Boll Weevil Agricultural Shock Impacts on Educational Attainment

This dataset supports a study on the long-run educational impacts of the boll weevil agricultural shock in the U.S. South. It uses a sample of adults from the 1940 census linked to their childhood records to analyze changes in educational attainment. The study found an increase of 0.24 to 0.36 years of schooling for children aged 4 to 9 when the weevil arrived.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between the timing of the boll weevil arrival and educational attainment outcomes for linked census individuals.
• Investigate differential impacts on educational attainment by race (white and black) as referenced in the study's findings.
• Study the long-run effect of a shift away from child labor-intensive cotton cultivation on school attendance opportunity costs.

Strengths

• Data is linked longitudinally, connecting adult records from the 1940 census back to childhood census records.
• The study's core finding is quantified, showing an educational attainment increase of 0.24 to 0.36 years for affected children.
• Focuses on a specific, well-documented historical shock with a clear temporal spread from 1892 to 1922.

Limitations

• Specific dataset structure, column details, row count, and file formats are unknown from the provided input.
• The data is historical and linked to specific census years, limiting analysis to that time period and population.
• As a replication package, the data may be tailored for a specific analysis and lack broader contextual variables.

Provenance

Source

ICPSR Harvested Dataverse

Collection Method

Sample of adults from the 1940 U.S. census linked back to their childhood census records.

Time Range

Primary analysis uses 1940 census data linked to earlier records, concerning a shock from 1892 to 1922.

Freshness

The metadata was last updated on 2026-02-23.

Geography

U.S. South, the region affected by the spread of the boll weevil.