Scholars historically believed that the market price data reported for Amsterdam markets were spot prices prior to 1747. Neal (The rise of financial capitalism: international capital markets in the Age of Reason. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990) provided econometric evidence that the...

Almond (2006) argues that in utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic lowered socioeconomic status in adulthood, whereas Brown & Thomas (2018) find that the effect disappears after controlling for parental characteristics of the 1919 birth cohort. We link microdata from the 1920 and 1930...

Digitized historical newspaper databases offer a valuable research tool. A rapidly expanding set of studies use these databases to address a wide range of topics. We review this literature and provide a toolkit for researchers interested in working with historical newspaper data. We provide a...

Between 1900 and 1930 typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases were largely eradicated from U.S. cities. This achievement required a mix of technological, scientific, economic, and bureaucratic innovations. This article examines how the interaction of those forces influenced water and...

Investment in water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eradicate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. This paper seeks to understand how these technologies affected human capital formation. We use typhoid fatality rates during early life as a proxy for...