Gender gaps in frontier entrepreneurship? Evidence from 1901 Oklahoma land lottery winners

TL;DR

This study examines gender differences in entrepreneurship using a historical land lottery in Oklahoma, revealing that women faced more liquidity constraints but were more effective in leveraging wealth for land purchases.

Contribution

It introduces a novel historical dataset and applies dose-response analysis to uncover gender disparities in early 20th-century land entrepreneurship.

Findings

Women were more effective in converting lottery wealth into land purchases.

Liquidity constraints were more binding for women in the land market.

Male winners had higher rates of farm or home ownership in 1910.

Abstract

The paper investigates gender differences in entrepreneurship by exploiting a large-scale land lottery in Oklahoma at the turn of the 20$^{\text{th}}$ century. Lottery winners claimed land in the order in which their names were drawn, so the draw number is an approximate rank ordering of lottery wealth. This mechanism allows for the estimation of a dose-response function, which relates each draw number to the expected outcome under each draw. I estimate dose-response functions on a linked dataset of lottery winners and land patent records, and find the probability of purchasing land from the government to be decreasing as a function of lottery wealth, which is evidence for the presence of liquidity constraints. I find female winners were more effective in leveraging lottery wealth to purchase additional land, as evidenced by significantly higher median dose-responses compared to those of male winners. For a sample of winners linked to the 1910 Census, I find that male winners have higher median dose-responses compared to female winners in terms of farm or home ownership. These results suggest that liquidity constraints may have been more binding for female entrepreneurs in the market economy.