Human Capital and Growth in the Post-Bellum South: A Separate but Unequal Story

This paper tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across states of the United States after 1880. Human capital levels are found to matter not only to a state's income level but also to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South's low human capital levels immediately after the Civil War, combined with its active resistance in the Post-Bellum period to educating its population, both white and black, played an important role in reducing the speed of Southern conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation after the Civil War.