Ethnic religious organizations are often blamed for slowing down immigrants' assimilation in host societies. This paper offers the first systematic evidence on this topic by focusing on Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians had moved to America,...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

Despite the growing literature on the impact of immigration, little is known about the role existing migrant settlements can play for knowledge transmission. We present a case which can illustrate this important mechanism and hypothesize that nineteenth century Danish-American communities helped...

In migration studies, immigrant health is a concern before, during, and after migration. This study uses a large late 19th and early 20th century data set of over 20 US prisons to assess migrant net nutrition. Native-born individuals were taller and had the lowest BMIs. International immigrants...

In the late nineteenth century, the North American bison was brought to the brink of extinction in just over a decade. We demonstrate that the loss of the bison had immediate, negative consequences for the Native Americans who relied on them and ultimately resulted in a permanent reversal of...

This paper documents the emergence of a race gap in incarceration after the abolition of slavery in the U.S. Counties that relied more on slave labor incarcerated more African Americans, with no comparable effects for whites. An increase of slave reliance by 10% increases black incarceration...

The economic history of the United States is that of Europeans and their institutions. Indigenous nations are absent. This absence is due partly to lack of data but in large measure to a perception that Indigenous communities have contributed little to US growth. This paper argues that this...

New hand-collected school administrative data from 1870s Virginia, alongside linked individual US Censusrecords, reveals that temporary school closures had lasting effects on literacy and income in adulthood. Those affected by the closures had lower intergenerational economic mobility,...

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....

I analyze the relationship between state‐level economic shocks and suicides using historical US gold discoveries (1840‐1860) as a large unexpected economic shock. Gold discoveries were an unexpected and large economic shock of up to 3.5% of GDP. They provide as good as random variation to...