Cities in the United States dramatically expanded spending on public education in the years following World War I, with the average urban school district increasing per pupil expenditures by over 70 percent between 1916 and 1924. We provide the first evaluation of these historically...

We explore the rise and fall of pellagra, a disease caused by inadequate niacin consumption, in the American South, focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. We first consider the hypothesis that the South's monoculture in cotton undermined nutrition by displacing local food...

We compare the strategy and direct-response methods in a one-shot trust game with hidden action. In our experiment, the decision elicitation method is not statistically associated with participants' behavior or beliefs. We find no evidence that the direct-response method induces guilt aversion.

We explore the rise and fall of pellagra, a disease caused by inadequate niacin consumption, in the American South, focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. We first consider the hypothesis that the South's monoculture in cotton undermined nutrition by displacing local food...

The Reconstruction era of American history (c. 1866-1877) saw widespread efforts to educate recently freed people - efforts which were at least partially abandoned in the post-Reconstruction era. This project examines the impact of childhood exposure to Reconstruction on long-run outcomes for...

This paper investigates the effect of a large negative agricultural shock, the boll weevil, on racial income gaps in the first half of the twentieth century. We draw on complete count census data to generate a new large linked sample of Black and white fathers and their sons. Fathers are...

Growth in per pupil education spending in the United States was mostly flat until 1918, after which it increased by almost 100% in a brief six-year period. This is the fastest documented increase in per pupil education spending in U.S. history. Using newly digitized biennial data on 386 of the...

We compare the strategy and direct-response methods in a one-shot trust game with hidden action. In our experiment, the decision elicitation method affects neither participants' behavior nor their beliefs about this behavior. We conclude that the direct-response method does not, by itself,...