This paper shows how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused and entrenched Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion and postwar reconciliation. These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate symbols and racial norms to become...

This paper provides a novel perspective on the Great Migration out of the U.S. South. Using a shift-share identification strategy, we show how millions of Southern white migrants transformed the cultural and political landscape across America. Counties with a larger Southern white share by 1940...

In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to another, based on their relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative...

The United States is among the most individualistic societies in the world. However, unlike Western European individualism, which is imbued with moral universalism, America's "rugged individualism" is instead particularistic. We link this distinctive cultural configuration to the country's...

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

This chapter reviews key literature studying the effects of wars on minority and underrepresented groups in U.S. labor markets in the 20th century. These labor markets, characterized by historically pervasive barriers to entry into certain occupations and industries, promotions, and fair pay for...

This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure which can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to...

Are the costs of discrimination mainly borne by the targeted group or by society? This paper examines both individual and aggregate costs of ethnic discrimination. Studying Germans living in the U.S. during World War I, an event that abruptly downgraded their previously high social standing, we...

Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an...

We study the influence of agricultural labor intensity on individualism across U.S. counties. To measure historical labor intensity in agriculture we combine data on crop-specific labor requirements and county-specific crop mix around 1900. To address endogeneity we exploit climate-induced...