In the late 1930s, the NAACP launched a campaign to equalize Black and white teacher salaries in the de jure segregated schools of the American South. Using newly collected county panel data spanning three decades, this paper first documents heterogeneous within-state impacts of the campaign on...

Two million Mexicans were granted lawful permanent residency in the U.S. under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). We find that occupation and program use variables in a prominent proxy for legal status poorly detect this event. A decade after legalization, the share of...

We estimate the effects of permanent legal status on the health of children born to immigrants in the United States using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Our empirical approach compares trends in birth outcomes for foreign-born Mexican mothers across...

Brown v. Board of Education had little immediate effect on the dual system of education in the South; by the early 1970s, however, Southern schools were the most racially integrated in the country. This paper uses newly assembled and uniquely comprehensive data to document how different types of...

American teenagers perform considerably worse on international assessments of achievement than do teenagers in other high-income countries. This observation has been a source of great concern since the first international tests were administered in the 1960s. But does this skill gap persist into...

This paper examines how a large conditional grants program influenced school desegregation in the American South. Exploiting newly collected archival data and quasi-experimental variation in potential per-pupil federal grants, we show that school districts with more at risk in 1966 were more...