During the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), the US maintained an open border, absorbing 30 million European immigrants. Prior cross-sectional work on this era finds that immigrants initially held lower-paid occupations than natives but experienced rapid convergence over time. In...

Immigration to democratic nations generates new groups of potential voters. This paper investigates how the electorate share of immigrant groups influences their likelihood of becoming politically mobilized, focusing on the mechanism of coalition formation with the Democratic Party. Using newly...

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the rising net price of children. But empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this price and by endogeneity bias. I develop a model of household production in the 19th century United States...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

Fundamental to the Malthusian model of pre-industrial society is the assumption that higher income increased reproductive success. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic of this model, the empirical support for this vital assumption in the preindustrial world is weak. Here we examine the...

Based largely on the Fifteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Department of Labor, published in 1900, we have built a sample of wages and hours for roughly fifty countries in six continents that covers the period 1890-1900. The Report, which is drawn from official (national) publications, gives...

The Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913) was among the largest migration episodes in history. During this period, the United States maintained open borders. Using a novel dataset of Norway-to-US migrants, we estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection across households...

This paper considers the extent to which crime in early America was conditioned on height. With data on inmates incarcerated in Pennsylvania state penitentiaries between 1826 and 1876, we estimate the parameters of Wiebull proportional hazard specifications of the individual crime hazard. Our...

We propose an alternative test for adverse selection using notarial records for slaves sold in New Orleans in 1830. The experiment is simple and mimics the used car example originally proposed by Akerlof (1970). When first sold in New Orleans, buyers of imported slaves were uninformed of the...

Although plantation records indicate that many slaves in the southern United States were artisans and craftsmen, relatively few slaves were recorded as such on the New Orleans sales invoices. Robert Fogel (1989, p.57, 162) assumes that the slaves without recorded occupations were unskilled...