This paper uses data from California in 1860, a period in which property rights were uncertain, to investigate the relationship between the certainty of property rights and agricultural production. The negative effect of uncertain property rights on farm values, crop production, and wheat...

Using historical census and survey data, Long and Ferrie (2013) found a significant decline in social mobility in the United States from 1880 to 1973. We present two critiques of the Long-Ferrie study. First, the data quality of the Long-Ferrie study is more limiting than the authors...

Between 1800 and 1860, mean adult stature of (U.S.) white males declined by nearly an inch, while real output grew substantially, creating the “Antebellum Puzzle.” In contrast, male slaves did not experience a comparable decrease in heights. To explain this puzzle within a puzzle, we show...

We construct decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the Mid-Atlantic region between 1720 and 1800. They show that the region likely achieved modest improvements in per capita GDP over this period despite a number of demographic factors that tended to slow the pace of...

This paper examines the relationship of inequality to school funding in counties of the U.S. in 1890. Inequality, measured here on the basis of farm-size distributions, is found to be negatively related to local school property tax revenues across the whole sample of 1345 rural counties....

Formal schooling has a significant impact on modern agricultural productivity but there is little evidence quantifying the historical importance of schools in the early development of the American agricultural sector. I present new data from the Midwest at the start of the twentieth century...

Many postbellum southern farms specialized in cotton, but black-operated farms planted much larger shares of cotton than white-operated farms. This paper tests various explanations for the pattern of specialization using 1879 farm-specific data. We find that the cross-sectional racial variation...

Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in...

Little research exists on the body mass index values of late 19th- and early 20th-century African-Americans. Using a new BMI data set and robust statistics, this paper demonstrates that darker complexioned black BMIs were greater than for mulattos, and a mulatto BMI advantage did not exist....