"Written in celebration of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review (February 2011), this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its...

We present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007. Black ownership increased by 46 percentage points, whereas white ownership increased by 20 points. Remarkably, 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910. Part of this early convergence...

Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan African–American households increased by 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white...

This chapter briefly surveys the principal issues in the economic history of international migration. As a way of framing this vast, unruly topic, I view the issues through the lens of the nation receiving the majority of immigrants historically – the United States prior to World War One....

During the 1940s, racial differences in wages narrowed at an unusually rapid pace. Using a decomposition technique different from that of previous studies, the author shows that wage compression between and within groups—the so-called “Great Compressionâ€â€”was a major...