How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men's regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote? The story begins with the civil rights...

This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it. We apply this among women living in poor households in urban Macedonia....

The modern economic role of women emerged in four phases. The first three were evolutionary; the last was revolutionary. Phase I occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s; Phase II was from 1930 to 1950; Phase III extended from 1950 to the late 1970s; and Phase IV, the "quiet...

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv)...

Using data on 2.5 million great-grandchildren linked to their great-grandfathers in the US (1850-1940), we show that economic gaps persisted strongly across four generations despite major structural change. We find that one-third of the initial differences in economic status across white...

Early twentieth century efforts to overhaul the quality of medical education in the United States (principally between 1905 and 1915 - the "Flexner Report Era") led to a steep decline in the number of medical schools and medical school graduates. In this paper, we examine the consequences of...

In the early 1940s, Japanese American farmers represented a highly skilled segment of the agricultural workforce in the Western United States, characterized by higher education levels and more specialized farming expertise than U.S.-born farmers. During World War II, around 110,000 Japanese...

This chapter explores the impacts of migrants on the culture of their destinations. Migrants often assimilate to local social norms and practices, but they also tend to maintain their own culture. Sometimes, beyond preserving their culture, they influence their new neighbors. We propose a...

Election results act as powerful signals, shaping social behavior in ways that can be dramatic and even violent. This paper shows how racial violence in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South was tied to the local performance of the anti-Black Democratic Party in presidential elections. Using a...

We shed new light on historical black-white disparities in wealth and economic mobility by examining datasets of linked census records. First, we compare black and white men's intra- and inter-generational mobility into property ownership between 1870, the first census taken after the Civil War,...