To engage with the large literature on the economic effects of slavery, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border. We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower farm values on the slave side. Half of the...

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 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...

We propose a new measure of cultural distance based on differences in the composition of first names and church denominations between locations. We use a gravity equation to estimate the elasticity of migration flows with respect to the two components of cultural distance as well as a standard...

This paper investigates the economic consequences of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned immigration from China to the United States. The Act reduced the number of Chinese workers of all skill levels residing in the U.S. It also reduced the labor supply and the quality of jobs held by...

Using data on 2.5 million great-grandchildren linked to their great-grandfathers in the US (1850-1940), we show that economic gaps persisted strongly across four generations despite major structural change. We find that one-third of the initial differences in economic status across white...

Early twentieth century efforts to overhaul the quality of medical education in the United States (principally between 1905 and 1915 - the "Flexner Report Era") led to a steep decline in the number of medical schools and medical school graduates. In this paper, we examine the consequences of...

We introduce a new rule-based linking method for historical Census records. We augment earlier algorithms based on name, age and place of birth (Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson, 2012, or "basic ABE"), with five matching characteristics - middle initial, county of residence, and spouse and parents'...

Election results act as powerful signals, shaping social behavior in ways that can be dramatic and even violent. This paper shows how racial violence in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South was tied to the local performance of the anti-Black Democratic Party in presidential elections. Using a...

We shed new light on historical black-white disparities in wealth and economic mobility by examining datasets of linked census records. First, we compare black and white men's intra- and inter-generational mobility into property ownership between 1870, the first census taken after the Civil War,...