Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations *
Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2016 · Hoyt Bleakley、Joseph P. Ferrie
中文摘要
财富匮乏是否会制约父母对后代人力资本的投资？我们对一次向家庭随机分配大量财富的事件进行了近五十年的追踪研究，有理由认为，这次财富分配可能缓解了此类约束。我们追踪了1832年佐治亚州切罗基土地抽签参与者的后代；当时，佐治亚州几乎所有成年白人男性都参与了这次抽签。中签者获得的财富数额接近财富中位数——这是一笔可观的意外之财，与参与者那些也可能影响其子女人力资本的自身特征正交，即不相关。尽管中签者的子女略多于未中签者，但他们并未让子女接受更多学校教育。中签者的儿子在成年后的表现（财富、收入、识字能力）并不优于未中签者的儿子，中签者的孙辈在识字能力或就学情况方面也不优于未中签者的孙辈。这表明，在这一环境下，家庭财力在后代人力资本形成中的作用有限，而其他在家族中代际延续的因素可能发挥更重要的作用。
Abstract
Does the lack of wealth constrain parents' investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a nearly fifty-year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families. We track descendants of participants in Georgia's Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, in which nearly every adult white male in Georgia took part. Winners received close to the median level of wealth - a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants' underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children's human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than non-winners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners' grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners' grandchildren. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.