By the end of the Civil War, 186,017 black men had fought for the Union Army and roughly three-quarters of these men were former slaves. Because most of the black soldiers who served were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. The war experience of these men...

Much of the increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been in developing countries with a history of famines and malnutrition. Prior research has pointed to the association between overweight and famine exposure during developmental ages as one of several explanations and has...

I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of a very poor population by studying the effects of pensions on the decisions of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were 2 to 5 times as responsive as whites to income transfers in...

Differentials between blacks and whites in birth weights and prematurity and stillbirth rates have been persistent over the entire twentieth century. Differences in prematurity rates explain a large proportion of the black-white gap in birth weights both among babies attended by Johns Hopkins...

This paper introduces four new intergenerational and multigenerational datasets which follow both sons and daughters and which can be used to study the persistence of longevity, socioeconomic status, family structure, and geographic mobility across generations. The data follow the children of...