School quality and educational attainment: Japanese American internment as a natural experiment

Abstract

In 1942, the United States incarcerated all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including children, in internment camps. Using non-West Coast Japanese Americans and non-Japanese Asians as control groups, I estimate the effect of attending a War Relocation Authority school on educational attainment. Non-linear difference-in-differences estimates suggest that attending school within the internment camps decreased the probability of receiving a post-collegiate education by approximately 4 to 5 percentage points and decreased the probability of receiving a college degree by between 2 and 7 percentage points. I find some evidence that attending a WRA school may have decreased the returns to education as well. By using un-incarcerated birth cohorts and races, placebo tests find no evidence that the identifying assumptions are violated.

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Date

7-1-2015

Publication Title

Explorations in Economic History

Department

Economics

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2015.02.001

Keywords

School quality, Education, Returns to education, Japanese American Internment

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS