Using two million census records, we document cultural assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration, a formative period in US history. Immigrants chose less foreign names for children as they spent more time in the US, eventually closing half of the gap with natives. Many immigrants also...

We compile large datasets from Norwegian and US historical censuses to study return migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913). Return migrants were somewhat negatively selected from the migrant pool: Norwegian immigrants who returned to Norway held slightly lower-paid occupations...

The paper analyzes the effect of the generosity of the welfare state on the skill composition of immigrants. We develop a parsimonious model in which the effect of an increase in the generosity (and taxes) of the welfare state on the skill composition of immigrants under free migration is...

Skilled migrants typically contribute to the welfare state more than they draw in benefits from it. The opposite holds for unskilled migrants. This suggests that a host country is likely to boost (respectively, curtail) its welfare system when absorbing high-skill (respectively, low-skill)...

This paper examines the effect of ethnic enclaves on economic outcomes of Norwegian immigrants in 1910 and 1920, the later part of the Age of Mass Migration. Using different identification strategies, including county fixed effects and an instrumental variables strategy based on chain migration,...

We provide the first estimates of ethnic segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan-Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition...