Three Essays on Rural Resilience

Abstract

This dissertation expands the concept of rural resilience to include the agricultural sector in the historical and contemporary context of the US. Across three essays, the topics include intergenerational occupational choices, migration decisions, farmland consolidation, structural transformation, and rural mortality. In the first essay, I study the Dust Bowl’s impact on intergenerational occupational choices in US agriculture. Using US full-count census panel data from 1920 to 1940 and a difference-in-difference design, I find that occupational persistence rates decreased by 2%. Children of farmers were 15% less likely to become self-employed farmers and 10% more likely to become paid farm workers. Additionally, children who migrated out of Dust Bowl-affected areas were 77% more likely to work off-farm. This study suggests that the Dust Bowl contributed to the structural transformation of the US economy in the 20th century. In the second essay, I look at the impact of US compulsory education laws on occupational persistence in agriculture. Using the US full-count census and the census of agriculture from 1860 to 1910, event study estimates indicate an 8% decrease in the probability of children from farm households becoming farmers. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the disadvantaged groups were more likely to shift from agricultural to non-agricultural sectors. The number of farms declined as average farm size concurrently increased, suggesting a consolidation of the farm sector. This study shows evidence that US compulsory education laws played a role in accelerating structural transformation in the late 19th to early 20th century. In the third essay, my coauthors and I look at the relationship between commodity prices and all-cause mortality in all 485 counties in the US Midwest for the period 1980 to 2016. We rely on a two-way, county and time fixed effects strategy as well as on a number of robust panel data estimators. We find that a decrease in commodity prices is associated with increased mortality across all counties, a result driven by rural counties and by corn revenues. For robustness, we also estimate specifications in which we instrument farm revenues with measures of drought severity, and we conduct falsification tests. Finally, we show that the relationship between commodity prices and rural mortality appears driven by cardiovascular disease.