Contrary to conventional wisdom, the doors did not suddenly slam shut on American immigrants when Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of May 1921. Rather, the United States started imposing restrictions a half century earlier. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, and Canada enacted similar...

What determines the intensity and objects of hatred? Hatred forms when people believe that out-groups are responsible for past and future crimes, but the reality of past crimes has little to do with the level of hatred. Instead, hatred is the result of an equilibrium where politicians supply...

Germany has experienced a high and rising rate of anti-foreigner violence during the early 1990s. To analyze the determinants of crime against foreigners we assembled a new data set on the number and nature of such crimes at the county level based on newspaper reports. We find significant...

We analyze under which conditions intermarriage can be used as an indicator of tolerance, and whether such tolerant attitudes persisted in Germany during the last century. We find strong evidence for the persistence of tolerant attitudes towards intermarriage with Jews. At the same time, our...

We combine national administrative data on earnings and participation in subsidized housing to study how the demolition of 160 public housing projects--funded by the HOPE VI program--affected the adult labor market outcomes for 18,500 children. Our empirical strategy compares children exposed to...

A growing number of surveys elicit respondents' expectations for future events on a 0-100 scale of percent chance. These data reveal substantial heaping at multiples of 10 and 5 percent, suggesting that respondents round their reports. This paper studies the nature of rounding by analyzing...

Natural-resource taxation and investment exhibit cycles in a vast number of countries, driving political turmoil and power shifts. Using a rational-expectations model, we show cycles result from governments' inability to commit to future taxes and firms' inability to credibly exit a country...

The invention of new applications based on information and communications technologies (ICTs) has had two economic effects up to now. These applications have transformed production, creating value for applications-inventing companies and their customers and increasing economic growth through...

Online advertising offers unprecedented opportunities for measurement. A host of new metrics, clicks being the leading example, have become widespread in advertising science. New data and experimentation platforms open the door for firms and researchers to measure true causal effects of...

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...