The Great Migration–the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West–was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth...

A striking negative correlation exists between an area's residential racial segregation and its population characteristics, but it is recognized that this relationship may not be causal. I present a novel test of causality from segregation to population characteristics by exploiting the...

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...

Historical wealth micro-data from Wentworth County, Ontario examines the evolution of female and male wealth holding in the wake of 19th century property rights legislation. The results reveal that male wealth was greater than female wealth in Wentworth County but that over time the gap...

I use a new sample of families linked between the 1860 and 1880 U.S. censuses to study the impact of migration to frontier cities on job holding. Using variation in transportation costs between different regions of the country to generate exogenous migration, I find frontier city migration had...

This study analyzes trends and determinants of the height of men born in the 100 largest American urban areas during the second half of the nineteenth century and compares them with heights of the rural population. In this sample of 21,704 US Army recruits, there is an urban height penalty of up...

Research on housing supply has grown owing to improved data combined with heightened interest in policies such as local land use regulations. Heterogeneity in supply conditions across markets is shown to be essential to understanding the growing price dispersion across metropolitan areas, as...

The recent and growing literature which has extended the use of search and matching models even to the housing market does not use the free entry or zero-profit assumption as a key condition for solving the equilibrium of the model. This is because a straightforward adaptation of the basic...

We show that the Kaldor (1940) trade cycle mechanism can be meaningfully applied to the market for residential housing space, since the demand for houses may be positively related to the housing price in a mid-range price domain, while it is downward sloping for house prices sufficiently small...

The response of housing prices to changes in the geography of the economy and population within cities is empirically understudied. This paper examines the spatial dynamics of the Hong Kong housing market between 1992 and 2008, a time period that includes two periods of strong price appreciation...