America’s expansion to one of the richest nations in the world was partly due to a steady increase in labor productivity, which in turn depends upon the invention and deployment of new technologies and on investments in both human and physical capital. The accumulation of human capital—the...

Black women were more likely than white women to participate in the labor force from 1870 until at least 1980 and to hold jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. Differences in observables cannot account for most of this racial gap in labor force participation for the 100 years after Emancipation....

The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection...

This paper provides an overview of recent empirical and methodological advances in the study of historical intergenerational mobility trends, with a focus on key measurement challenges. These advances are made possible by the recent digitization of historical censuses and new methods of...

Immigrant enclaves offer valuable ethnic amenities but may delay assimilation. We study enclave formation in the Age of Mass Migration by using the centralized location decisions for "ethnic" Catholic churches. After a church opening, same-ethnicity residents of chosen neighborhoods experienced...

Since the 1970s, computerized machine tools have been replacing semi-skilled manufacturing workers, contributing to factory automation. We build a novel measure of exposure to computer numerical control (CNC) based on initial variation in tool types across industries and differential shifts...

This chapter surveys new data sources employed in urban and regional economics in the past decade and the insights they have enabled. We first provide a primer on the data sources, including advantages, disadvantages and use cases. Historical data sources include linked census records as well as...

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial...