This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...

This paper introduces a new measure of residential segregation based on individual-level data. We exploit complete census manuscript files to derive a measure of segregation based upon the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. Our measure allows us to analyze segregation consistently and...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it's the Iberian colonists' fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America...

Soviet growth over 1960-89 was the worst in the world after we control for investment and human capital; the relative performance worsens over time. The declining Soviet growth rate over 1950-87 is explained by the declining marginal product of capital; the rate of TFP growth is roughly constant...

We present estimates of home ownership for African-American and white households from 1870 to 2007. The estimates pertain to a sample of households headed by adult men participating in the labor force but the substantive findings are unchanged if the analysis is extended to all households. Over...

The US Civil War provides researchers a unique opportunity to identify wartime leaders and thus to test theories of leadership. By observing both leaders and followers during the war and forty years after it, I establish that the most able became wartime leaders, that leading by example from the...

This paper seeks to better understand the historical origins of current differences in norms and beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and...

Using data from 1869 to 1928, we estimate the effect of party control of state governments on the entry, exit, circulation, prices, number of pages, and content of Republican and Democratic daily newspapers. We exploit changes over time in party control of the governorship and state legislatures...

This summary of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge) was prepared for presentation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health in March 2011. The book is built on the authors' work with 300 years of height...

Living arrangements have changed enormously over the last two centuries. While the average American today lives in a household of only three people, in 1850 household size was twice that figure. Further, both the number of children and the number of adults in a household have fallen...