Description:

Speakers: Myera Rashid and Davis Kedrosky

Myera's talk: "Engine of Intergenerational Mobility: Typewriter Adoption and Women's Economic Outcomes"

Abstract: Women’s economic outcomes changed dramatically over the last century, but there is scarce evidence on the role of workplace technological advances in fueling these changes. This paper studies the effects of the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces on women's economic outcomes in the 20th century. Exploiting variation in the demand for typists across industries coupled with the geographic distribution of industries, I document that the adoption of the typewriter caused an increase in women's labor force participation and a decrease in their likelihood of being married and having children. I show that the mechanisms driving these developments operated through two main channels: there was a direct effect driving White women to leave the household and enter offices, and an indirect crowding-in effect that increased the participation of Black women, who substituted for White women by entering domestic service work. The typewriter also resulted in upward mobility for women through the channel of marriage. Using linked data following women over time, I show that typists were more likely to marry men of higher socioeconomic status compared to women working in alternative white-collar occupations. This result holds in a within-household analysis comparing sisters. This finding is consistent with a hypothesis that typing and secretarial occupations offered women a unique opportunity to work in offices alongside higher earning men.

Davis's talk: "The Success of the Informal State in Britain"

Abstract: We study the performance of the informal state in early modern Britain. Traditional accounts by economic historians suggest that the development of a Weberian bureaucracy—composed of hierarchically organized, paid, and professionally motivated civil servants—during the eighteenth century was a precondition for the British Industrial Revolution. We document three stylized facts that challenge this conventional wisdom. First, even during the early nineteenth century, there were over seven times as many informal local officers as professional civilian bureaucrats. Second, unsalaried parish, county, and borough officers provided most public goods, including justice, policing, and infrastructure. Third, the centralizing reforms that created an integrated Weberian bureaucracy did not occur until the late nineteenth century. Using a new dataset on over 12,500 municipal officers in 257 British towns in 1832, we show that informal officers were more effective at providing public goods than their ‘Weberian’ peers. We argue that, when a full Weberian bureaucracy is outside the choice set, informal public service based on prosocial motivation (prestige, respectability, or political office) may be a second-best method of organizing the state—and that this method was consistent with the origins of modern economic growth.