Increasing the diversity of policy committees has taken center stage worldwide, but whether and why diverse committees are more effective is still unclear. In a randomized control trial that varies the salience of female and minority representation on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy...

Inflation expectations are central to economics because they affect the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy as well as realized inflation. We survey the recent literature with a focus on the inflation expectations of households. We first review standard data sources and discuss their...

This paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on workers with differing levels of labor force attachment. Exploiting variation in labor market tightness across metropolitan areas, we show that the employment of populations with lower labor force attachment--Blacks, high school...

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...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

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...

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...

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...