Does the lack of wealth constrain parents' investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a fifty-year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of wealth to families. We track descendants of those eligible to win...

The state of Georgia allocated most of its land to the public through a system of lotteries. These episodes provide unusual opportunities to assess the long-term impact of large shocks to wealth, as winning was uncorrelated with individual characteristics and participation was nearly universal...

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...

Analyzing three datasets on black and white soldiers and the black and white populations from the same birth years, this paper finds that black soldiers during the American Civil War had much higher human capital than the black population.

We provide new estimates of migrant flows into and out of America during the Age of Mass Migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Our analysis is based on a novel data set of administrative records covering the universe of 24 million migrants who entered Ellis Island, New York between...

According to the culture of honor hypothesis, the high prevalence of homicide in the US South originates from the settlement of the region by herders from the fringes of Britain in the late 18th century. Combining contemporary homicide data with historical Census data, this paper confirms that...

Fundamental to the Malthusian model of pre-industrial society is the assumption that higher income increased reproductive success. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic of this model, the empirical support for this vital assumption in the preindustrial world is weak. Here we examine the...

This paper reviews recent literature using stature and weight as measures of human welfare with a particular interest in cliometric or historical research. We begin with an overview of anthropometric evidence of living standards and the new but fast-growing field of anthropometric history. This...

An atlas of settlement patterns in 19th century America is produced based on microdata from the 1880 census of the United States and the 1881 census of the United Kingdom. The first part of the atlas shows migration from state or country of parental origin to county of residence, for persons...