The literature on immigrant assimilation and intergenerational progress has sometimes reached surprising conclusions, such as the puzzle of immigrant advantage which finds that Hispanic immigrants sometimes have better health than U.S.-born Hispanics. While numerous studies have attempted to...

Using Census and CPS data, we show that U.S.-born Mexican Americans who marry non-Mexicans are substantially more educated and English proficient, on average, than are Mexican Americans who marry co-ethnics (whether they be Mexican Americans or Mexican immigrants). In addition, the non-Mexican...

We present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public good the city supplies. We test the implications of the model with three related datasets: US cities, US metropolitan areas, and US urban counties. Results show that...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

The authors explore unique complete-count data from the 1930 Census in which a respondent's race was assigned by enumerators and "Mexican" was one of the possible responses. Census enumerators frequently and selectively assigned a non-Mexican race--predominantly "white"--to U.S.-born individuals...

Soviet growth over 1960-89 was the worst in the world after we control for investment and human capital; the relative performance worsens over time. The declining Soviet growth rate over 1950-87 is explained by the declining marginal product of capital; the rate of TFP growth is roughly constant...