We describe a new dataset created from the first 18,000 savings accounts opened (from 1850 to 1858) at the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York City. The bank was founded by Irish Americans and most of its depositors in its first decade of operations were recent Irish immigrants. The...

Automated census linkage algorithms have become popular for generating longitudinal data on social mobility, especially for immigrants and their children. But what if these algorithms are particularly bad at tracking immigrants? Using nineteenth-century Irish immigrants as a test case, we...

We use databases we have created from the records of New York's Emigrant Savings Bank, founded by pre-Famine Irish immigrants and their children to serve Famine era immigrants, to study the social mobility of bank customers and, by extension, Irish immigrants more generally. We infer that New...

Previous research has documented the importance and persistence of social norms, but there is limited understanding of whether they are capable of changing in the short run. Utilizing data from Sweden and Denmark, this article addresses this gap by testing whether significant local shocks may...

A century ago, and for most of the twentieth century, Ireland was a land of emigration, not immigration. However, in the space of less than a decade in the 2000s, Ireland was transformed from a homogeneous community, where nonnative residents were in a very small minority, to one in which...

This paper first explores the history of famine in England as a window on living standards in the medieval and pre-industrial eras. It then considers nutrition levels and human capital endowments in England in the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s. -- Ireland ; Economic history ; Literacy...