Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long-term development? This paper explores whether the distinct...

We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that...

In municipalities on the urban fringe in the United States, large-lot zoning is commonly thought of as a rural preservation tool. It could preserve rural landscapes by making residential lots too expensive for most homebuyers; or it could simply lead to estates that resemble farms or retain...

This paper introduces a new high frequency time series of Confederate money prices taken from the newspapers of Richmond and leading cities in the Eastern Confederacy. The new Grayback series is tested for "turning points". The empirical analysis suggests that "turning points" in the Confederate...

This paper provides a county-level investigation of the root causes of gun violence in the U.S. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple theoretical model which suggests that firearm-related offenses in a given county increase with the number of illegal guns and decrease with social...

We provide empirical evidence of the dynamics of city size distribution for the whole of the twentieth century in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. We focus our analysis on the new cities that were created during the period of analysis. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is the...