The nineteenth-century American family experienced tremendous demographic, economic, and institutional changes. By using birth order effects as a proxy for family environment, and linked census data on men born between 1835 and 1910, we study how the family's role in human capital production...

The United States is among the most individualistic societies in the world. However, unlike Western European individualism, which is imbued with moral universalism, America's "rugged individualism" is instead particularistic. We link this distinctive cultural configuration to the country's...

Women's contribution to the economy has been markedly underestimated in predominantly agricultural societies, due to their widespread involvement in unpaid agricultural work. Combining data from the US Census and several early sources, we create a consistent measure of male and female employment...

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...

We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using newly digitized manuscripts from the US Census of Manufactures (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880). Female-owned establishments were smaller than male-owned establishments and had lower capital-to-output ratios, which could reflect...

The failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank (FSB), one of the only Black-serving banks in the early post-bellum South, was an economic catastrophe and one of the great episodes of racial exploitation in post-Emancipation history. It was also most Black Americans' first experience of banking. Can...

On February 5, 1917, the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which included a test for all migrants arriving to the U.S. to prove they were literate. The Literacy Test was one of the first and few times the U.S. used a broad 'skill-based' immigration policy in an attempt to limit...

This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of a large organization can persistently shift gender norms. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by...

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...

We analyze whether government spending multipliers differ by the sign of the shock. Using aggregate historical U.S. data, we apply Ben Zeev's (2020) nonlinear diagnostic tests and find evidence of nonlinearities in the impulse response functions of both government spending and GDP. We then...