Air pollution was severe in many urban areas of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, in part due to the burning of bituminous coal for heat. We estimate the effects of this bituminous coal consumption on mortality rates in the U.S. during the mid-20th century. Coal...

This paper contributes to the literature on the labor market consequences of unhealthy behaviors and poor health by examining a previously underappreciated consequence of the rise in obesity in the United States: challenges for military recruitment. Specifically, this paper estimates the percent...

We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names...

We examine the effect of joint custody on marriage, divorce, fertility and female employment in Austria using individual-level administrative data, covering the entire population. We also use unique data obtained from court records to analyze the effect on post-divorce outcomes. Our estimates...

This paper studies in- and out-migration from the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century and assesses how these flows affected state-level labor markets. It shows that out-migration positively impacted the wages of remaining workers, while in-migration had a negative impact. Hence,...

While a growing literature has shown that empowering women leads to increased short-term investments in children, little is known about its long-term effects. We investigate the effect of women's political empowerment on children's human capital accumulation by exploiting plausibly exogenous...

Fertility is a main driver and outcome of long-term growth. Yet, fertility may not only interact with the level of income but also with its volatility. In pre-modern economies where formal social security was largely absent, fertility decisions may also have been made in view of insuring income...

The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties...

This paper tracks the economic status of American Jewry over the past three centuries. It relies on qualitative material in the early period and quantitative data since 1890. The primary focus is on the occupational status of Jewish men and women, compared to non-Jews, with additional analyses...

Since the 1970s almost all states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. We analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on the incidence of marriage and divorce. Our identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across states and the control group of...