I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural US, 1820-1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort's county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard deviation increase in...

Immigrant distribution--the geographic dispersion of immigrants in the destination country--was a major issue in the United States in the late Age of Mass Migration. Policy debates were influenced by the widely held view that the new immigrants were generally less geographically mobile within...

After adjusting for sample-selection bias, I find a net decline in average stature of 0.64 inches in the birth cohorts of 1832--1860 in the US. This result supports the veracity of the Antebellum Puzzle--a deterioration of health during early modern economic growth in the US. However, this...

This handbook chapter seeks to document the economic forces that led the US to become an urban nation over its two hundred year history. We show that the urban wage premium in the US was remarkably stable over the past two centuries, ranging between 15 and 40 percent, while the rent premium was...

Why were the poorer countries of the European periphery latecomers to the Age of Mass Migration? We test the diffusion hypothesis, which argues that mass emigration was delayed because it was primarily governed by a gradual process of spatial diffusion of migration networks. We propose a model...

We combine full-count Census data (1850-1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950-2020) to provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1850-2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants had higher incarceration rates than US-born white men before...

The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection...

I study the internal migration of native-born white men in the United States using linked census data covering all possible 10- and 20-year periods 1850--1940. Inter-county migration rates were stable over time. Selection into migration on the basis of occupational status was also largely stable...