Using the US Commissioner of Labor Survey of 1890, we examine household decisions and parental altruism vis-a-vis their children. Contrary to Parsons and Goldin (1989), we find that parental location choices were dictated by constraints rather than the desire to exploit child labour...

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on...

We study the evolution of racial educational inequality across US states from 1940 to 2000. We show that throughout this period, despite evidence of convergence, the racial gap in attainment between blacks and whites has been persistently determined by the initial gap. We obtain these results...

This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach...

Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in...

We provide new estimates of migrant flows into and out of America during the Age of Mass Migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Our analysis is based on a novel data set of administrative records covering the universe of 24 million migrants who entered Ellis Island, New York between...

In order to explore the optimal taxation of low-skilled labour, we extend the standard model of optimal non-linear income taxation in the presence of quasi-linear preferences in leisure by allowing for in-voluntary unemployment, job search, an exogenous welfare benefit, and a non-utilitarian...

We develop an equilibrium search-matching model with risk-neutral agents and two-sided ex-ante heterogeneity. Unemployment insurance has the standard effect of reducing employment, but also helps workers to get a suitable job. The predictions of our simple model are consistent with the...

This paper offers an alternative theory for the increase in unemployment and wage inequality experienced in the United States over the past two decades. In my model firms decide the composition of jobs and then match with skilled and unskilled workers. The demand for skills is endogenous and an...

The administration of benefits is a relatively neglected aspect of the analysis of disincentive effects of unemployment benefit systems. We investigate this issue with a field experiment in Hungary involving random assignment of benefit claimants to treatment and control groups, a method of...