The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 imposed a variety of industry-specific labor market regulations, including bans on employment of minors under 16 in many industries. Using full-count Census data, I employ a cohort study with a continuous difference-in-difference design to investigate the effects of these child labor bans on educational attainment and labor market outcomes.
Post-war suburbanization focused growth in the urban fringes outside the boundaries of central cities. This led to growth of the metropolitan population outside the boundaries of municipal government—known at the time as the “Metropolitan problem”. One proposed solution was annexation, the expansion of a municipality’s boundaries into surrounding territory. However, state laws varied in the extent to which they allowed cities to annex. We construct a panel of city-level boundary changes and outcomes between 1944 and 2020. We document extensive annexation in this period: the average city in 2020 is nearly four times as large as in 1944. There is significant regional divergence: the average city is 7.7 times as large as in 1944 in the South, and 1.11 times as large in the Northeast. We then leverage variation in ability to annex to evaluate whether annexations were drivers of efficiency gains or if they simply growth for growth’s sake.