Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine how this affected public health by pairing annual mortality data for over 600 registration districts, spanning 1869 to 1910, with detailed waterworks information. Identification is aided by...

How does diversity in government impact public good provision? To address this question, we construct a novel dataset linking the ethnicity of California city council candidates to election outcomes and expenditure decisions. We then study how the narrow election of a candidate whose ethnicity...

America's 1840s state debt crisis presents a unique opportunity to identify whether the adoption of self-imposed fiscal constraints lowers sovereign borrowing costs. After nine states defaulted, 20 states adopted constitutional provisions that constrained the legislature's ability to issue debt....

Infants who are underweight at birth earn less, score lower on tests, and become less educated as adults. Previous studies have found mixed evidence that socioeconomic status mitigates this effect. In this paper, we reconcile these findings using a unique dataset in which adoptees were...