The racial gap in the value of owner occupied housing has narrowed substantially since 1940, but this narrowing has not been even over time or across space. The 1970s stand out as an unusual decade in which the value gap did not narrow despite continued convergence in the observed...

Using data from the 1900, 1910, 1940, and 1950 census public use samples, this paper examines the determinants of racial differences in employment (occupation and industry) in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. Had racial differences in the quantity and quality of...

Everyone knows that public school officials in the American South violated the Supreme Court's separate-but-equal decision. But did the violations matter? Yes, enforcement of separate-but-equal would have narrowed racial differences in school attendance in the early twentieth century South. But...

This paper is my presidential address to the Economic History Association. In it, I review and extend the economic history of racial differences in per capita income from 1870 to the present. Specifically, I revise pre-World War Two benchmark estimates of Black/White income ratios originally...