I argue that the trend toward single households among retired men 65 years of age or older has been ongoing since 1880. When coresidence is measured by the percentage of elderly men living in the households of their children or other relatives, fully 57 percent of the decline in coresidence...

We document the correlations between early childhood health (as proxied by height) and educational attainment and investigate the labor market and wealth returns to height for United States cohorts born between 1820 and 1990. The nineteenth century was characterized by low investments in height...

I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators, and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that health improvements were largest among...

When the Fair Labor Standards Act was first implemented, a 5% reduction in the length of the standard workweek reduced by at least 18% the proportion of men and women working more than 40 hours per week. This analysis, based on monthly time series data from 1935–41 BLS surveys and...

The widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago. This paper documents this dramatic change in women's social and economic status and argues that it was determined both by contemporaneous...