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Presentation from Carolina Vera Rivera, PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics.
PAPER TOPIC: High Waters, Unequal Ground: The 1937 Ohio River Flood and Economic Inequality
ABSTRACT: This paper studies whether a major environmental shock alters economic mobility and individuals' positions in the economic distribution. I examine the 1937 Ohio River Flood by combining a newly constructed enumeration-district-level measure of flood damage with linked full-count U.S. Census records from 1920, 1930, and 1940. The empirical design compares individuals living in damaged enumeration districts before the flood with individuals in undamaged comparison areas, conditional on pre-flood characteristics. Flood exposure shifts the father-son occupational-rank gap downward by 1.6 rank points; relative to their respective control means, upward mobility falls by 6 percent and large downward mobility rises by 7 percent. In the occupational-rank sample, exposure lowers post-flood occupational rank conditional on pre-flood rank and raises the probability of ending in the bottom occupational-rank quartile. Relative to their respective control means, wage income among earners falls by 6 percent, and pure unemployment rises by 17 percent. Mechanism evidence is consistent with occupational displacement: declines in self-employment and occupational status are substantially larger among individuals self-employed before the flood, while public emergency work is more prevalent in cities with greater flood severity. The findings show that environmental disasters can have distributional consequences beyond the immediate disruption, shifting exposed individuals downward in the post-shock economic distribution.