John Juneau

The transmission of skills and preferences from parents to children leads to intergenerational persistence in sector choice. How do these inherited connections alter the process of structural transformation? Using linked father-son records in census microdata, this paper establishes that both inherited skills and inherited preferences are important sources of persistence in the United States between 1880 and 1940. Embedding these findings into a macroeconomic model of structural change, the paper shows that intergenerational persistence slowed the process of U.S. industrialization by 12.8 percent. Inherited skills account for nearly all of this slowdown because their immediate and dynamic effects reinforce each other, whereas those of inherited preferences largely offset. Accounting for persistence also implies substantially greater agricultural technology growth relative to nonagriculture than a model without persistence would infer from the same historical transition.

Between 1880 and 1940, the United States transformed from a largely agrarian economy into an industrialized one. The emergence of new cities in rural America played an important role in this transition.

The ability of state governments to stimulate their economies through tax policy changes has long been debated. At the same time, a distinct debate considers the extent to which the distributional targeting of tax changes influences their effect on economic activity. This paper examines the intersection of these debates: to what extent does the distributional targeting of a state government income tax change mediate its effect on a state's economic activity? Using thirty years of detailed income tax return microdata and multiple panel-data research designs, including an event-study local projection approach, our results suggest that state-level employment responds positively to tax cuts targeted at the broad lower portion of the income distribution, but provide no evidence that economic activity responds to tax shocks targeted at the highest-income households.