"Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, racially diverse nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. Wrongly assumed to be inarticulate on paper, these laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay...

How does economic modernization affect group identity? Modernization theory emphasizes how labor migration led to the adoption of common identities. Yet economic development may reduce incentives to emigrate, preserving local cultures. We study England and Wales during the Second Industrial...

This paper documents persistence in the power of elite families in Central China despite dynastic change. We study the impact of the fall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) on couples and their descendants (treatment of people), and present evidence on the response of multigenerational family lines...

Using a newly digitized database encompassing the universe of tariff lines across five US trade policy regimes between 1900 and 1940, we show that price dynamics combine with industry reliance on specific tariffs to generate large swings in average tariff levels. Intra-policy variation in...

Congressional intent concerning the independence of the Federal Reserve matters because it protects the public from the politicization of monetary policy. Attempts to subordinate monetary policy to the President could easily end up in front of the Supreme Court. The outcome of such a case would...