Using a new source of 19th century state prison records, this study contrasts the biological living conditions of comparable US African-American and white female statures during economic development. Black and white female statures varied regionally, and white Southeastern and black Southwestern...

This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women’s behavior in the United States - looking both over time with immigrants' residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor...

This paper calls into question the currently most influential model of international trade. An empirical finding by Trefler (2004, AER) and others that industrial productivity increases more strongly in liberalized industries than in non-liberalized industries has been widely accepted as...

Although women earn approximately 50 percent of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor's degrees, more than 70 percent of scientists and engineers are men. We explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of...

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the use of biological measures are now standard in economics. This study uses late 19th and early 20th century BMI, statures, and weight to assess how net nutrition accumulated to women and men during US economic development....

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

Discrimination in access to public services can act as a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality. We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to a wide spectrum of public services in the US. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to...

Discriminatory programs that favor local and small firms in government procurement are common in many countries. This paper studies the long-run impact of procurement discrimination on market structure and future competition in industries where learning-by-doing makes incumbent firms more...