Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern...

We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers governing large territories, where administrative power needs to be delegated to local elites. We describe how economic change can motivate rulers to empower different elites and emphasize the interaction...

In the presence of segregation and discrimination during the late 19th and early 20th century, many African American men changed their racial identity and "passed" for white. Previous studies have suggested that this activity was associated with increases in income and socioeconomic status...

How does economic modernization affect group identity? Modernization theory emphasizes how labor migration led to the adoption of common identities. Yet economic development may reduce incentives to emigrate, preserving local cultures. We study England and Wales during the Second Industrial...

For most of human history, until the fertility transition, technological progress translated into larger populations, preventing sustained improvements in living standards. We argue that migration offered an escape valve from these Malthusian dynamics after the European discovery and...

Public health interventions often involve a trade-off between improving health and protecting individual rights. We study this trade-off in a high-stakes setting: prostitution regulations aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Victorian Britain. These...

We argue that migrants played a significant role in the diffusion of the demographic transition from France to the rest of Europe in the late 19th century. Employing novel data on French immigration from other European regions from 1850 to 1930, we find that higher immigration to France...

Why were the poorer countries of the European periphery latecomers to the Age of Mass Migration? We test the diffusion hypothesis, which argues that mass emigration was delayed because it was primarily governed by a gradual process of spatial diffusion of migration networks. We propose a model...

Fertility levels have greatly decreased in virtually every nation in the world, but the timing of the decline has differed even among developed countries. In Europe, Asia, and North America, total fertility rates of some nations dipped below the magic replacement figure of 2.1 as early as the...

This paper examines the extent to which changes in working-age shares associated with population aging might slow economic growth in upcoming years. We first analyze the economic effects of changing working-age shares in a standard empirical growth model using country panel data from 1950-2015....