This study provides an estimation of the causal relationship between the reduction in malaria transmission and farmer agricultural productivity. Exploiting exogenous ge- ographic variations in the stability of malaria and using historical disaggregated county data for the US together with a...

This paper records the path by which African Americans were transformed from enslaved persons in the American economy to partial participants in the progress of the economy. The path was not monotonic, and we organize our tale by periods in which inclusiveness rose and fell. The history we...

According to culinary scholars, American food retained a strongly British character through most of its history. Chinese food was the exception. Beginning in the early-twentieth century, Chinese restaurants began appearing outside of Chinatowns and the cuisine entered the cultural mainstream....

Why did America embrace right wing populism in the 2016 election? A look back at past moments of economic transformation suggests that government policy of "producerism" mitigated the pain and fear among those losing jobs and opportunity in a changing economy. The abandonment of this policy...

The consensus view among economic historians is that wage inequality in American manufacturing followed an inverted-U path from the early nineteenth century until just before World War Two. The previous literature, however, has been unable to fully document this path over time, or fully assess...

This paper studies the effect of religion on the economic progress of Black Americans after Reconstruction. Southern religious institutions-particularly the Southern Baptist church-played a key role in the development of the Lost Cause mythology that helped legitimate the white supremacist...

This paper is concerned with analyzing the occupational status of American Jewish men compared to other free men in the mid-19th century to help fill a gap in the literature. It does this by using the 1/100 microdata sample from the 1850 Census of Population, the first census to ask occupation....