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...

When race is not directly observed, regulators and analysts commonly predict it using algorithms based on last name and address. In small business lending--where regulators assess fair lending law compliance using the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) algorithm--we document large...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link...

A large body of evidence finds that relative mobility in the US has declined over the past 150 years. However, long-run mobility estimates are usually based on white samples and therefore do not account for the limited opportunities available for non-white families. Moreover, historical data...

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 County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau track employment by county and industry from 1946 to the present. Two features of the data limit their usefulness to researchers in practice: (1) employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...

Innovation is a key driver of long run economic growth. Studying innovation requires a clear view of the characteristics and behavior of the individuals that create new ideas. A general lack of rich, large-scale data has constrained such analyses. We address this by introducing a new dataset...

Income is simultaneously one of the most important variables used by economists and the variable most likely to be missing due to item non-response. While observations that are missing income responses are often dropped from analyses, such treatment is usually inappropriate. More appropriate...

Third-party cookies and related 'offsite' tracking technologies are frequently used to share user data across applications in support of ad delivery. These data are viewed as highly valuable for online advertisers, but their usage faces increasing headwinds. In this paper, we quantify the...