Abstract The rise in inequality in the US over the last few decades has been well documented. However, the effects of inequality on polarization and middle class in particular are less well studied and understood. We employ Relative Distribution tools (Handcock and Morris, 1998) on the well...

Analyses of the economic effects of the introduction of the public pension system on older men in the US have been hamstrung by difficulties generating reliable estimates of historical labor-force participation rates using data from early US censuses that only asked respondents about their...

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the rising net price of children. But empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this price and by endogeneity bias. I develop a model of household production in the 19th century United States...

This paper provides new insights on the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition. We exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the American South in the 1890s as plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural production to establish a causal link between earnings...

An atlas of settlement patterns in 19th century America is produced based on microdata from the 1880 census of the United States and the 1881 census of the United Kingdom. The first part of the atlas shows migration from state or country of parental origin to county of residence, for persons...

In the beginning of the 1890s, counties located in the Cotton Belt of the American South were hit by an agricultural plague, the boll weevil, that adversely affected cotton production and hence the demand for labor. We use variation in the incidence of the boll weevil multiplied with counties’...

In the beginning of the 1890s, counties located in the Cotton Belt of the American South were hit by an agricultural plague, the boll weevil, that adversely affected cotton production and hence the demand for labor. We use variation in the incidence of the boll weevil multiplied with counties’...

In the beginning of the 1890s, counties located in the Cotton Belt of the American South were hit by an agricultural plague, the boll weevil, that adversely affected cotton production and hence the demand for labor. We use variation in the incidence of the boll weevil multiplied with counties’...

Although racial inequalities are much researched, studies differ on the specific measure of individuals’ racial identity that they consider. This can affect the comparability of results across studies and, more importantly, the estimation of racial inequality in society. We estimate the extent...

We show that changes in birth order during the baby boom can explain a substantial share of the stagnation and recovery in educational attainment among cohorts born between 1946 and 1974. Combining birth order effects estimated using the Health and Retirement Survey and birth order data from...