Does the lack of wealth constrain parents' investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a fifty-year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of wealth to families. We track descendants of those eligible to win...

The state of Georgia allocated most of its land to the public through a system of lotteries. These episodes provide unusual opportunities to assess the long-term impact of large shocks to wealth, as winning was uncorrelated with individual characteristics and participation was nearly universal...

While health affects economic development and wellbeing through a variety of pathways, one commonly suggested mechanism is a "horizon" channel in which increased longevity induces additional education. A recent literature devotes much attention to how much education responds to increasing...

New longitudinal data on individuals linked across nineteenth century U.S. censuses document the geographic and occupational mobility of more than 75,000 Americans from the 1850s to the 1920s. Together with longitudinal data for more recent years, these data make possible for the first time...

This study examines a wide range of health and economic outcomes in a sample of Irish- and African-American Civil War veterans during the postbellum period. The information in our data is from a variety of circumstances across an individual's life span, and we use that to attempt to explain...

We document the correlations between early childhood health (as proxied by height) and educational attainment and investigate the labor market and wealth returns to height for United States cohorts born between 1820 and 1990. The nineteenth century was characterized by low investments in height...

We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphologic feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls at these...

To engage with the large literature on the economic effects of slavery, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border. We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower farm values on the slave side. Half of the...

Between 1850 and 1925, the crude death rate in Chicago fell by 60 percent, driven by reductions in infectious disease rates and infant and child mortality. What lessons might be drawn from the mortality transition in Chicago, and American cities more generally? What were the policies that had...

We explore the dynamics of the agricultural ladder (the progression from laborer to cropper to renter) in the U.S. before 1940 using individual-level data from a survey of farmers conducted in 1938 in Jefferson County, Arkansas. Using information on each individual's complete career history...