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...

This paper examines the effect of waterborne lead exposure on infant mortality in American cities over the period 1900 to 1920. Variation across cities in water acidity and the types of service pipes, which together determined the extent of lead exposure, identifies the effects of lead on infant...

The 1960s ushered in a new era in US demographic history characterized by significantly lower fertility rates and smaller family sizes. What catalyzed these changes remains a matter of considerable debate. This paper exploits idiosyncratic variation in the language of "Comstock" statutes,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe?s, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century. We extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10,000...

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using U.S. state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as...

We reanalyze Long and Ferrie's data. We find that the association of occupational status across generations was quite similar over time and place. Two significant differences were: (i) American farms in 1880 were far more open to men who had nonfarm backgrounds than were American farms in 1973...