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...

Can new technology cause social instability and unrest? We examine the famous `Captain Swing' riots in 1830s England. Newly-collected data on threshing machine diffusion shows that labor-saving technology was associated with more riots. We instrument technology adoption with the share of heavy...