Studies of the determinants of emigration from Europe from 1850 to 1913 include the gains to migrants but often neglect the costs. One component of those costs is earnings forgone on the voyage. In this paper I present new data on the voyage times for emigrants from the UK traveling to the...

From 1860 to 1913 the six colonies that became states of Australia strove to attract migrants from the UK with a variety of assisted passages. The colonies/states shared a common culture and sought migrants from a common source, the UK, but set policy independently of each other. This experience...

Sailing ships persisted on emigrant voyages to Australia until the late nineteenth century and passage durations decreased by three weeks from the late 1840s to the mid-1880s. The shortening of voyages by sail has been linked to improvements in navigation and in sailing ship technology but...

The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic,...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

We compute rates of absolute upward income mobility for the 1960-1987 birth cohorts in eight countries in North America and Europe. Rates and trends in absolute mobility varied dramatically across countries during this period: the US and Canada saw upward mobility rates near 50% for recent...

Using data on 17 countries in Europe and North America, we compare the career trajectories of mothers and fathers and of women and men without children across cohorts, and at different points of their life cycle. There is wide variation across countries in employment and earnings gaps at age 30....

The effect of job loss on health may play an important role in the development of the SES-health gradient. In this paper, we estimate the effect of job loss on objective measures of physiological dysregulation using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study and biomarker measures...