The failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank (FSB), one of the only Black-serving banks in the early post-bellum South, was an economic catastrophe and one of the great episodes of racial exploitation in post-Emancipation history. It was also most Black Americans' first experience of banking. Can...

This study provides an estimation of the causal relationship between the reduction in malaria transmission and farmer agricultural productivity. Exploiting exogenous ge- ographic variations in the stability of malaria and using historical disaggregated county data for the US together with a...

The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios...

This paper introduces the concept of "climate matching" as a driver of migration and establishes several new results. First, we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select...

Williams (2022) ties the political participation of Blacks to historical lynchings that occurred in the United States. Her findings document lower Black voter registration rates in southern counties with greater number of historical lynchings. We show that this effect is driven by four outlier...

The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties...

We propose a method to correct estimates from historical linked data for bias arising from type-I error--"false matches." We estimate the rate of false matching from the disagreement rate in characteristics that should agree across the two linked datasets. Combined with an understanding of the...

We explore the impact of one of the earlier epidemics to hit natives living in the Hudson Bay drainage basin: the smallpox outbreak of 1780-82. We review contemporary descriptions of the epidemic and how Europeans at the time viewed its impact on the native population of the region. We then...

Using newly digitized Canada-Vermont border crossing records from the early twentieth century, this paper identifies key factors that may explain differences in how female and male migrants sort by human capital across destinations. Earnings maximization largely explains sorting patterns among...

This study considers the effect of attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on wages of black students. A model is developed to estimate reduced form wages equations conditioned on the decision to attend a four year HBCU, non-HBCU or no four year institution. Models are...