We shed new light on historical black-white disparities in wealth and economic mobility by examining datasets of linked census records. First, we compare black and white men's intra- and inter-generational mobility into property ownership between 1870, the first census taken after the Civil War,...

This paper traces the diffusion of fair employment legislation at the state level and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political, and economic factors in the promotion (or at least the acceptance) of the principle of government-enforced anti-discrimination policy. The...

The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...

The Great Migration from the US South is a prominent theme in economic history research not only because it was a prime example of large scale internal migration, but also because it had far-reaching ramifications for American economic, social, and political change. This article offers a concise...

We study the impacts of WWII service and access to GI Bill benefits on the educational and labor market outcomes of individuals of various ethnic and racial groups. We address selection into military service directly by linking veterans and nonveterans from 1950's census records to the...

The historical evolution of racial differences in income in the 20th century United States has been examined intensively by economists, but the evolution of racial differences in wealth has been examined far less. This paper uses IPUMS data to study trends in racial differences in home ownership...

Conventional wisdom has it that global financial markets were as well integrated in the 1890s as in the 1990s, but that it took several post-war decades to regenerate the connections that existed before 1914. This view has emerged from a variety of tests for world financial capital market...

We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twentieth century. We find large disparities...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question: Are trade and factor flows substitutes? While this sounds like an open invitation for empirical research, hardly any serious econometric work has appeared in the literature. This paper uses history to fill...

The confluence of the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement propelled the drive for fair-housing' legislation which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the...