African-Americans entered the post-Civil War era with extremely low levels of exposure to schooling. Relying primarily on micro-level census data, we describe racial differences in literacy rates, school attendance, years of educational attainment, age-in-grade distributions, spending per pupil,...

This paper documents and explores black-white differences in U.S. women's labor force participation, occupations, and wages from 1940 to 2014. It draws on closely related research on selection into the labor force, discrimination, and pre-labor market characteristics, such as test scores, that...

The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...