Essays on Economic HistoryHa, Joung Yeob (2024) Essays on Economic History. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished)
AbstractUtilizing newly digitized datasets and novel research methods, this dissertation sheds light on previously underexplored events in American history and introduces innovative techniques that generate new data and improve the accuracy of historical analysis. The first essay examines the impact of inclusive propaganda on cultural assimilation. During World War I, the U.S. government established the Committee of Public Information (CPI) to promote national unity and integrate immigrants into the country's shared culture and values. Using a novel dataset of the CPI's wartime campaigns and a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that immigrants in cities with higher exposure to the CPI's inclusive propaganda were more likely to naturalize, marry native-born spouses, and give their children American names. These immigrants also showed greater support for the war by purchasing more war bonds and saving more food than natives. The second essay documents how the Ku Klux Klan's anti-immigrant ideology shaped urban residential patterns in the early twentieth century. Using a novel method to track city blocks consistently across census years, I find that immigrant concentrations did not affect native flight. However, the Klan's ideology significantly influenced movers within the city. Klan members were more likely to relocate to blocks with fewer immigrants, especially Catholics and southern and eastern Europeans, who were the primary targets of the Klan. The third essay, co-authored with Andreas Ferrara and Randall Walsh, shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure that can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to deal with non-classical measurement error in a binary treatment: set identification, bias reduction via sample restriction, and a parametric bias correction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by replicating four recent economic history papers. Relative to the initial analyses, our results yield markedly larger coefficient estimates. Share
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