About

Hoyt Bleakley is a Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, affiliated with the Department of Economics and the Population Studies Center. His research areas include Economic History, Development Economics, Labor Economics, Health, and International Macroeconomics. He holds a research position as a Research Professor at the Population Studies Center. His work focuses on macroeconomics, development, and labor markets, contributing to the understanding of economic history and health economics. His office is located at 3446 North Quad, 105 S State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Demography
• Psychology
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Labour economics
• Geography
• Economic growth
• Social psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• Longevity, Education, and Income: How large is the triangle?

  Journal of Health Economics · 2025-08-27

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Economic Effects of American Slavery: Tests at the Border

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-06-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To engage with the large literature on the economic effects of slavery, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border.We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower farm values on the slave side.Half of the border region was half underutilized.This does not support the view that abolition was a costly constraint for landowners.Indeed, the lower demand for similar, yet cheaper, land presents a different puzzle: why wouldn't the yeomen farmers cross the border to fill up empty land in slave states, as was happening in the free states of the Old Northwest?On this point, we find evidence of higher wages on the slave side, indicating an aversion of free labor to working in a slave society.This evidence of systemically lower economic performance in slavery-legal areas suggests that the earlier literature on the profitability of plantations was misplaced, or at least incomplete.

  PublisherDOI

• The Economic Effects of American Slavery: Tests at the Border

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Malaria in the Americas : a retrospective analysis of childhood exposure

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2024-06-04 · 36 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study considers the malaria-eradication campaigns in the United States (circa 1920), and in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico (circa 1955) in order to measure how much childhood exposure to malaria depresses labor productivity. The campaigns began because of advances in health technology, which mitigates concerns about reverse causality. Malarious areas saw large drops in the disease thereafter. Relative to non-malarious areas, cohorts born after eradication had higher income as adults than the preceding generation. These changes coincided with childhood exposure to the campaigns rather than to pre-existing trends.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• De Tocqueville, Population Movements, and Revealed Institutional Preferences

  Journal of Historical Political Economy · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Demography
  • Sociology

  During their grand tour of the United States in 1831–1832, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont struggled to make sense of the regional differences, until they traveled down the Ohio River. There, they observed differences on opposite riverbanks, where the environment is similar but the institutions differ. They reported that the northern side attracted more free migrants than the southern side; and that this difference bolstered the regional disparities in population growth (with important consequences for the antebellum political economy). Following their analysis, we examine the emigrant guidebooks and travelers’ accounts of the environmental and institutional attributes of the free and slave regions. We then use census data to analyze the behavior of migrants to the border region. We find that the revealed institutional preferences of free people are key to understanding the comparative development of the regions.

  PublisherDOI

• Mind the Gap: Schooling, Informality, and Fiscal Externalities in Nepal

  The World Bank Economic Review · 2023-05-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While increasing years of schooling has been a long-standing development priority, the associated fiscal costs and benefits have been less studied, because of a lack of appropriate data. Recently, an UNESCO-funded project measured subsidies, by levels of schooling, from all levels of government, in eight developing countries including Nepal. The household-level Nepal Living Standards Measurement Survey provides information to estimate the degree of formality, tax payments, and benefit receipts as a function of schooling years. Using a simple Mincer-like model, this study estimates the fiscal externality of an additional year of school. It finds that within primary school, fiscal benefits and costs, on the margin, are quite balanced, with subsidies close to the present value of future taxes minus benefits. At higher levels of schooling, however, marginal fiscal benefits exceed costs by 5 percent of per capita consumption. This contrasts with previous literature on social returns and assumptions underlying multilateral development goals.

  PublisherDOI

• Mind the Gap: Schooling, Informality, and Fiscal Externalities in Nepal

  2023-06-08

  book1st authorCorresponding

  While increasing years of schooling has been a long-standing development priority, the associated fiscal costs and benefits have been less studied, because of a lack of appropriate data. Recently, an UNESCO-funded project measured subsidies, by levels of schooling, from all levels of government, in eight developing countries including Nepal. The household-level Nepal Living Standards Measurement Survey provides information to estimate the degree of formality, tax payments, and benefit receipts as a function of schooling years. Using a simple Mincerlike model, this study estimates the fiscal externality of an additional year of school. It finds that within primary school, fiscal benefits and costs, on the margin, are quite balanced, with subsidies close to the present value of future taxes minus benefits. At higher levels of schooling, however, marginal fiscal benefits exceed costs by 5 percent of per capita consumption. This contrasts with previous literature on social returns and assumptions underlying multilateral development goals.

  PublisherDOI

• When the Race between Education and Technology Goes Backward: The Postbellum Decline of White School Attendance in the Southern US

  Research in economic history · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Demographic economics

  Abstract This study examines a sharp decline of school attendance among white children in the Southern US after the Civil War. According to Census data, the school-attendance rate among whites in the Confederate states declined by almost half from 1860 to 1870, whereas the rate in Northern states was approximately stable. This shock left the South approximately three decades behind its antebellum trend. We account for little of this drop with household variables plausibly affected by the War. However, a select few county-level variables (notably the drop in wealth) explains around half of the decline, which suggests a systemic explanation. We adopt a model-based approach to decomposing the decline in schooling into demand versus supply factors. On the supply side, the region saw a decline in wealth and public resources, but we observe a stable relationship between time in school and literacy or adult occupation, which is not consistent with a contracting constraint on school quantity or quality. Nevertheless, further research is required to determine how much the contraction in school access affected attendance. On the demand-side, we present suggestive evidence of a decline in the return to school (measured by the relative wage of engineers to laborers). Relatedly, we see a “brain drain”: in longitudinally linked census samples, educated Southerners were more likely to migrate out of the South after the War.

  PublisherDOI

• Mind the Gap: Schooling, Informality and Fiscal Externalities in Nepal

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 11. Amidst Poverty and Prejudice

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph P. Ferrie

  12 shared

• Aimee Chin

  12 shared

• Jeffrey Lin

  6 shared

• Kevin Cowan

  Delft University of Technology

  6 shared

• Fabian Lange

  4 shared

• Louis P. Cain

  4 shared

• Adam B. Ashcraft

  3 shared

• Jeffrey C. Fuhrer

  3 shared

Labs

• MITREPI

Education

• PhD, ECONOMICS

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2002