The vast majority of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century adopted first names that were common among natives. The rate of adoption of an American name increases with time in the US, although most immigrants adopt an American name within the first year of arrival....

The cultural assimilation of immigrants into the host society is often equated with prospects for economic success, with religion seen as a potential barrier. We investigate the role of ethnic enclaves and churches for the assimilation of Danish Americans using a difference-indifferences...

This paper studies the impact of the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease -diphtheria antitoxin- on the historical health transition in the United States. Using an instrumental variable for local antitoxin adoption rates and information from approximately 1.6 million death...

We merge the longitudinally linked historical U.S. Census records with data on lynchings of Hispanics in Texas to investigate the impacts of historical lynchings of ethnic Mexicans in Texas on U.S.-born Mexicans Americans. Using variation in lynching incidents across counties over time, we...

Using full count U.S. census data, we study the impact of early 20th-century state-industry-specific minimum wage laws that primarily targeted female employees. Our triple-difference estimates suggest a null impact of the minimum wage laws, potentially reflecting disemployment effects and the...

This paper proposes a novel empirical strategy to estimate the causal effects of federal "redlining" – the mapping and grading of US neighborhoods by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). In the late 1930s, a federal agency created color-coded maps to summarize the financial risk of...

The vast majority of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century adopted first names that were common among natives. The rate of adoption of an American name increases with time in the US, although most immigrants adopt an American name within the first year of arrival....

We document that, over the 20th century, age at first marriage followed a U-shaped pattern, while the gender education gap tracked an inverted-U path in the United States. To explain this, we propose a multi-period frictionless matching model where educational and marriage decisions are...

When traditional measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, stature and the body mass index (BMI) are now widely-accepted measures that reflect economic conditions. However, little work exists for late 19th and early 20th century women’s BMIs in the US and how they varied with...