The Lanham Act was a federal infrastructure bill passed by Congress in 1940 and eventually used to fund programs for the preschool and school-aged children of working women during WWII. It remains, to this day, the only example in US history of an (almost) universal, largely federally-supported...

This report is organized as follows. After this introduction, the second section explains the main data sources used in the study. The third section discusses the relationship between sectoral output growth and employment generation, and presents basic estimates on growth elasticities. The...