The traditional historical narrative claims that White women were rarely involved in market transactions for enslaved people in the antebellum United States. Using transaction records, notary statements, and runaway advertisements, we provide the first quantitative estimates of the extent of...

PART ONE: A BLESSED OLD AGE -- Chapter 1: DO YOU BELIEVE IN PENSIONS? -- Chapter 2: LONGEVITY RISK AND RELIGION -- Chapter 3: THE BENEFITS OF POOLING -- PART TWO: CHURCH & UNIVERSITY -- Chapter 4: AN ENLIGHTENED FINANCIAL INNOVATION -- Chapter 5: A PRESBYTERIAN SCHEME FOR MINISTERS -- Chapter 6:...

How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We...

This paper studies long-run differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Black and White Americans. Combining data from linked historical censuses and contemporary large-scale surveys, we provide a comprehensive set of mobility measures based on Markov chains that trace the...