The spatial mismatch hypothesis posits that employment decentralization isolated urban blacks from work opportunities. This paper focuses on one large employer that has remained in the central city over the twentieth century - the U.S. Postal Service. We find that blacks substitute towards...

The black-white earnings gap has historically been larger in the South than in other regions of the United States. Since 1970, however, the male annual earnings gap outside the South has increased %u2013 dramatically, when the analysis factors in non-participants %u2013 while the gap within the...

In the American South, post-bellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties...

From 1900 to 1950, malaria rates declined rapidly in the southeast United States. At its peak, malaria infected over 30% of the population. Malaria declined over the period for several reasons: improvements in public infrastructure; development of new insecticides; improvements in agriculture...

Soon after beginning operations, the Federal Reserve established a nationwide network for collecting information about the economy. In 1919, the Fed began tabulating data by about retail sales, which it viewed as a fundamental measure of consumption. From 1920 until 1929, the Federal Reserve...

We examine the hypothesis that advances in household technology caused the US baby boom, and we find no support for this claim. Advances in household technology occurred before the baby boom, while fertility declined. From 1940 to 1960, levels/changes in county-level appliance ownership and...

This paper describes an effort to extend the record of US stock market returns past the 1871 terminus of the Cowles (1938) data familiar from Schiller (2015). I combined the archival data supplied by Goetzmann, Ibbotson and Peng (2001) with data supplied by Sylla, Wilson and Wright (2006), and...

Little is known about the performance of the US stock market before 1802, and evidence for the years following 1802 through the 1830s remains scanty. This paper describes a new database on total returns in the US stock market for the first fifty years of its existence, constructed in large part...

This study analyzes the legal problems in the development and management of Chesapeake Bay resources. There are threshold problems of definition - What is Chesapeake Bay? What are its resources? What role does law play in their development and management? The "Historical Perspective" traces the...