Areas differ in their propensity to experience natural disasters. Exposure to disaster risks can be reduced either through migration (i.e., self-protection) or through public infrastructure investment (e.g., building seawalls). Using migration data from the 1920s and 1930s, this paper studies...

We find that households living in California homes built in the 1960s and 1970s had high electricity consumption in 2000 relative to houses of more recent vintages because the price of electricity at the time of home construction was low. Homes built in the early 1990s had lower electricity...

Twenty-seven percent of the Union Army prisoners captured July 1863 or later died in captivity. At Andersonville, the death rate may have been as high as 40 percent. How did men survive such horrific conditions? Using two independent datasets, we find that friends had a statistically significant...