Between 1964 and 1971, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities, resulting in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as in considerable property damage that was concentrated in predominantly black neighborhoods. There have been few studies of a systematic, econometric nature...

African-Americans entered the post-Civil War era with extremely low levels of exposure to schooling. Relying primarily on micro-level census data, we describe racial differences in literacy rates, school attendance, years of educational attainment, age-in-grade distributions, spending per pupil,...

This essay, written in honor of the economic historian Robert Higgs, surveys the economic history of African Americans from the end of slavery to the present day. This history, I argue, was largely one of convergence. However, convergence was not continuous but, rather, was punctuated by...

We present estimates of home ownership for African American and white households from 1870 to 2007. These estimates, which pertain to a core sample of households headed by adult men, update and extend an earlier paper’s analysis (William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo 2001) with figures for...

Between 1940 and 1980, the rate of homeownership among African-American households increased by close to 40 percentage points. Most of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership was facilitated by the filtering of the urban housing stock as white households...

Written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review, this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its members, one of which is the...