Do veterans earn less? During WW I, the US organized "the greatest human lottery in history": a random draft of 24 million men. Ultimately, 2.8 million Americans were selected to join the armed forces. We sample 10% of registrants of the 1917 lottery and match these men with the 1930 and 1940 US...

What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures,...

Did living standards stagnate before the Industrial Revolution? Traditional real-wage indices typically show broadly constant living standards before 1800. In this paper, we show that living standards rose substantially, but surreptitiously because of the growing availability of new goods....

Did living standards stagnate before the Industrial Revolution? Traditional real-wage indices typically show broadly constant living standards before 1800. In this paper, we show that living standards rose substantially, but surreptitiously because of the growing availability of new goods....