Description:

Speaker: Pietro Buri (Princeton University)

Title: "The Urban Mortality Transition and the Transformation of the American City (1900-1930)".

Abstract: Between 1900 and 1930, the mortality rates in US cities fell dramatically. Part of this decline was caused by investments in public health infrastructures, such as the opening of a water filtration plant, which reduced overall mortality by 5%.  In this paper, I study the economic consequences of improvements in urban health. I combine data on mortality rates with data on wages and employment from the Census of Manufacturing. I instrument for the mortality in a city using the mortality in cities lying upstream of the same river. First, I find that mortality reduces the population’s growth rate. Second, I find that high-skill workers are more responsive than low-skill workers to urban mortality rates; high-skill wages are positively affected by high mortality rates, while I cannot reject a zero effect of mortality on low-skill wages. Cities with high mortality rates have a smaller ratio of high- to low-skill workers and a higher ratio of high- to low-skill wages. I complement the reduced-form evidence with a Rosen-Roback model which allows me to compute the amenity value by skill group for each city across time. I find that mortality has a negative impact on the amenity value of a city only for high-skill workers.