This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between patenting, innovation, and federal antitrust enforcement towards firms in the manufacturing sector. I examine whether the likelihood of antitrust litigation is influenced by patent histories and R&D expenditures, after...

A large body of evidence finds that relative mobility in the US has declined over the past 150 years. However, long-run mobility estimates are usually based on white samples and therefore do not account for the limited opportunities available for non-white families. Moreover, historical data...

Does the lack of international copyrights benefit or harm developing countries? I examine the effects of U.S. copyright piracy during a period when the U.S. was itself a developing country. U.S. statutes since 1790 protected the copyrights of American citizens, but until 1891 deemed the works of...

The presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and identify its long-run implications for culture and...

Economic studies typically underestimate incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations that enhance allocative efficiency and structural dynamics. This paper assesses over 12,000 innovations by female patentees and participants in industrial fairs and prize-granting institutions...

The paper explores the role of institutional mechanisms in generating technological knowledge spillovers. The estimation is over panel datasets of patent grants, and unpatented innovations that were submitted for prizes at the annual industrial fairs of the American Institute of New York, during...

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...

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

The number of individuals forcibly displaced by conflicts has been rising in the past few decades. However, we know little about the dynamics--magnitude, timing, and persistence--of conflict-induced migration in the short run. We use novel high-frequency data to estimate the dynamic migration...

We link census records for millions of farm children to identify owner-operators of the family farm in adulthood, providing the first population-level evidence on intergenerational farm transfers. Using our panel of U.S. census data from 1900 to 1940, our analysis supports the primogeniture...