Basic facts of infant mortality in the 19th-century United States are largely unknown due to a lack of data on births and infant deaths. Contradictory views have emerged from previous research. Estimates from life table exercises with US census data, published in the most recent (2006) Historical Statistics of the United States, suggest that infant mortality among US whites circa 1850–1880 was substantially worse than in much of contemporary Europe. However, a broader range of historical evidence indicates that US whites were among the healthiest 19th-century populations. METHODS We offer a new basis for estimating infant mortality: childhood sex ratios. Because of the female survival advantage in infancy, high rates of infant death tend to be reflected in female-skewed childhood sex ratios. We verify the empirical relationship between infant mortality and childhood sex ratios in historical populations with credible data on both and demonstrate that sex ratios can reveal broad patterns of infant mortality. RESULTS Turning to the US census for under-5 sex ratios, we find that white infant mortality circa 1850–1880 was in the range of 60–110 deaths per 1,000 – well under half the values presented in Historical Statistics of the United States and below contemporary European levels. By 1900, infant mortality in the United States had increased substantially, pointing to the challenges that modernization posed to population health. CONTRIBUTION We demonstrate a novel method of characterizing infant mortality, using childhood sex ratios. With census data often available where vital statistics are not, our method promises to shed new light on historical patterns of population health. Applied to the 19th-century

I use childhood sex ratios to characterize infant mortality rates among the US Black population 1850–1880, until now a matter of speculation due to a lack of birth and death records. Because of the biological survival advantage of infant females, high rates of infant mortality tend to skew the surviving population toward females. Building on this well-known fact, I use vital statistics data from contemporary Europe to quantify the empirical relationship between infant mortality and childhood sex ratios. Applying this relationship to the 19th century US, I compare infant mortality between the Black and white populations under slavery, and infant mortality among US Blacks before and after emancipation. Circa 1850 to 1860, the infant mortality rate among the Black population was around 300 deaths per 1,000, while the rate among whites was likely below 100. Infant mortality for US Blacks improved substantially after emancipation, dropping nearly 100 points to around 200 deaths per 1000, while white infant mortality remained roughly the same, cutting the Black-white disparity in half.

We explore how historic university establishment has impacted contemporary county-level economic mobility and inequality outcomes using site-selection natural experiments. We find that universities have led to greater mid-life upward intergenerational income mobility and more income inequality. We highlight five channels through which these effects operate: sorting of high-achieving households into university counties; a "hollowing-out" of local labor markets which has provided opportunities to achieve top incomes as well as increased inequality; increased educational attainment across the income distribution, greater innovative activity, and higher levels of social capital.

This article examines the association between modernization and career growth of American men and European immigrants, focusing on heterogeneity along ancestry , ethnicity, and early-career class position. Analyses rely on datasets built with individual-level linked historical Censuses (1901-1940), which longitudinally map socioeconomic indices of full occupational careers of late-nineteenth-century population birth cohorts (1884-1891). Modernization is measured by time-variant and metropolitan area-specific indicators of key industries, employment chances, domestic migration, and urbanicity. Contradicting modernization theory and the logic of industrialism, results demonstrate that macroeconomic opportunity structures do not explain differences in career growth curves of first-and second-generation immigrants in comparison to White men with US-born parents. Instead, we argue that structural ethnic cleavages, in combination with early-career class allocation, account for most of the observed immigrant variation in intragenerational mobility. We also find that the career growth curves of second-generation immigrants from Ireland, the Nordic countries, and Russia, in particular, far exceed those of multi-generational American men, but only if they started their careers in the working-class rather than the agricultural sector.

Exploiting cross-commuting zone differences in age composition among the old, this paper estimates the impact of retirements on youth labor market outcomes over the period 1980–2017. In commuting zones where fewer workers retire because of the initial age structure, there is no evidence of significant effects on youth employment, but the share of younger workers in high-skill jobs declines, while the share of younger workers in low-skill jobs rises. Fewer retirements also leads to declining youth wages and lower job mobility. This suggests that the retirement slowdown in recent decades has contributed to deteriorating early-career outcomes.

In contrast to earlier US policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the “Indian Problem,” the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty—making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)—and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides quantitative evidence on the demographic impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 US population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased the American Indian child mortality ratio by a little more than 15%. In secondary analyses (requiring additional assumptions) focused on total mortality, we find increases among young American Indians of nearly one-third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%). These results confirm contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.

I investigate the impact of delaying marriage on future income using historical data from the 1900–1940 United States Decennial Censuses. While existing literature suggests that marriage positively affects income, little is known about the financial implications of postponing marriage. I address that gap in knowledge by employing an instrumental variable framework, exploiting the effect of serving in WWI on age at marriage as an exogenous instrument, to determine the effect of delaying marriage on personal income. I leverage the Census Tree project to link individuals across census years, finding their siblings, age at first marriage, veteran status, and income. I then construct a dataset of WWI veterans and their brothers, controlling for family fixed effects and isolating the effect of interest. Furthermore, I control for potential biases in linkage probabilities through a weighting algorithm based on Bailey et al. (2019). Preliminary evidence suggests that delaying marriage has a positive and significant effect on personal income. This project contributes to the economic history literature by providing new insights into the opportunity costs of early marriage and the long-term economic trade-offs of delaying marriage during the early 20th century

Economists have long posited that scarce labor should encourage invention (Hicks 1932). We provide the first causal evidence of mass low skilled immigration's effect on invention, using variation induced by 1920s quotas to the United States, which ended history's largest international migration. Both counties and individual inventors exposed to fewer low-skilled immigrants applied for fewer patents. Firms with large establishment sizes disproportionately decreased their invention, suggesting invention depends on the scale of labor in production. In early twentieth century America, the increasing scarcity of labor discouraged invention, in part because labor scale and invention were complements.

This paper studies the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a school construction program in the early twentieth-century South. Using a new sample linking Social Security and census records, we find that exposure to Rosenwald schools raised Black women’s labor force participation and occupational standing in 1940; however, we find little evidence that Black men’s occupational standing significantly improved. Blacks made no discernible gains in jobs where they were underrepresented, while the gains they achieved were concentrated in jobs where they were commonly found. This suggests that the scope for Black occupational advancement was limited around 1940.

This paper provides new estimates of wage inequality in the United States from 1918 to 1949, leveraging a novel top-income methodology that integrates both tax records and census data. Our analysis reveals no sustained decline in wage inequality before the Second World War but a marked decrease during the war years. This decline was driven primarily by stagnation among the top 1 % of earners and significant wage growth at the lower end of the income distribution. However, the relative underperformance of the top earners was largely influenced by a major compositional shift triggered by unprecedented increases in corporate and personal income tax rates. These tax changes led to a shift in business preferences toward partnerships, resulting in a substantial transition from salaried employment to self-employment. This shift, previously overlooked in inequality studies, resulted in a 30 % overestimation of wage compression, significantly altering the wage distribution dynamics of the 1940s.

Economic adjustments can affect long-term aggregate and regional development through labor reallocation, capital investment, and structural change. This dissertation explores the role of such economic forces in shaping history by studying large-scale internal migration, environmental shock, and government investment in the 20th-century United States by combining empirical analysis with quantitative modeling. First, I study how the Second Great Migration (1940–1970) reshaped the American South between 1970 and 2010. The empirical analysis using shift-share instruments shows that out-migration induced capital investment and capital-augmenting technical change in the South. Labor was reallocated from agriculture to manufacturing and local services. To interpret these findings, I develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model that incorporates factor substitution, factor-biased technical change, and trade. The counterfactual analysis reveals labor-capital substitution as a key mechanism for adjusting to the out-migration.

Through the lens of the system of differential privacy specifications developed in Part I of a trio of articles, this second paper examines two statistical disclosure control (SDC) methods for the United States Decennial Census: the Permutation Swapping Algorithm (PSA), which is similar to the 2010 Census’s disclosure avoidance system (DAS), and the TopDown Algorithm (TDA), which was used in the 2020 DAS. To varying degrees, both methods leave unaltered some statistics of the confidential data – which are called the method’s invariants – and hence neither can be readily reconciled with differential privacy (DP), at least as it was originally conceived. Nevertheless, we establish that the PSA satisfies ε-DP subject to the invariants it necessarily induces, thereby showing that this traditional SDC method can in fact still be understood within our more-general system of DP specifications. By a similar modification to ρ-zero concentrated DP, we also provide a DP specification for the TDA. Finally, as a point of comparison, we consider the counterfactual scenario in which the PSA was adopted for the 2020 Census, resulting in a reduction in the nominal privacy loss, but at the cost of releasing many more invariants. Therefore, while our results explicate the mathematical guarantees of SDC provided by the PSA, the TDA and the 2020 DAS in general, care must be taken in their translation to actual privacy protection – just as is the case for any DP deployment.

This dissertation focuses on two aspects of environmental economics: (1) understanding the impacts of climate change on economic systems and individual decisions and (2) informing the design of environmental policies to foster adaptation to future climate risks. It aims to provide evidence of both academic and policy interests, combining diverse sources of data—censuses and surveys, satellite imagery, climate projections—with modeling tools from the empirical industrial organization literature. The first chapter, Protect or Prepare? Crop Insurance and Adaptation in a Changing Climate, explores one trade-off governments face when designing weather insurance policies. On the one hand, offering assistance to individuals and businesses to insure their assets and revenues against climate risk lowers the financial strains extreme weather events put on the economy. On the other hand, interventions in the insurance market may slow down the adoption of costly adaptation technologies and increase the climate vulnerability of the system in the future. I study this question in the U.S. Federal Crop Insurance Program context. This program regulates weather protection insurance and offers large premium subsidies to farmers. On average, farmers pay only 40% of the price of their insurance and subsidies add to between 5 and 10 billion dollars annually

U.S. patents do not report inventors’ gender, requiring researchers to infer the gender of inventors. To conduct these inferences, researchers must make several choices. We show how these researcher choices can affect conclusions about the role of women inventors in the U.S. from 1845 to 1924. More specifically, we compare two automated methods to determine inventor gender for the universe of U.S. patents: inferring gender from inventors’ first names and linking inventors to census data. These methods paint similar pictures about aggregate patterns of patenting by women, but often give different predictions about the gender of particular inventors. Both automated methods identify a larger number of patents by women inventors than have previously been identified in the literature. Using the gender inferred by these two methods, we study how the characteristics of patents and inventors differ by gender.

Economists have long posited that scarce labor should encourage invention (Hicks 1932). We provide the first causal evidence of mass low skilled immigration’s effect on invention, using variation induced by 1920s quotas to the United States, which ended history’s largest international migration. Both counties and individual inventors exposed to fewer low-skilled immigrants applied for fewer patents. Firms with large establishment sizes disproportionately decreased their invention, suggesting invention depends on the scale of labor in production. In early twentieth century America, the increasing scarcity of labor discouraged invention, in part because labor scale and invention were complements

This article is concerned with analyzing the occupational attainment of American Jewish men compared to other free men in the mid-19th century to help fill a gap in the literature on Jewish achievement. It does this by using the full count (100 percent) microdata file from the 1850 Census of Population, the first census to ask about the occupation of free men. Independent lists of surnames are used to identify men with a higher probability of being Jewish. These men were more likely than others to be managers, salesmen, and craft workers, and were less likely to be farmers and laborers. The Jewish men have a higher occupational income score on average. In the multiple regression analysis, it is found that among Jewish and other free men, occupational income scores increase with age (up to about age 43 for all men), literacy, being married, having fewer children, being native-born, living in the South, and living in an urban area. Even after controlling for these variables that impact the occupational income score, Jews have a significantly higher score, which is equivalent to about the size of the positive effect of being married. Similar patterns are found using the Duncan Socioeconomic Index. This higher occupational status is consistent with patterns found elsewhere for American Jews in the eighteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.

This paper documents that out-migration promotes the diffusion of innovation from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. Between 1870 and 1940, nearly four million British immigrants settled in the United States. We construct a novel individual-level dataset linking British immigrants in the US to the UK census, and we digitize the universe of UK patents from 1853 to 1899. Using a triple-differences design, we show that migration ties contribute to technology diffusion from the destination to the origin country. The text analysis of patents reveals that emigration promotes technology transfer and fosters the production of high-impact innovation. Return migration is an important driver of this “return innovation” effect. However, the interactions between emigrants and their origin communities—families and neighbors—promote technology diffusion even in the absence of migrants’ physical return.

In “The Effect of Women’s Access to Free Health Care on Breastfeeding Practices: Evidence from Armenia,” I examine the impacts of women’s increased access to health care on breastfeeding outcomes. More specifically, I analyze how the “For You, Women” program in Armenia, which extended free health care to women for one month each year, affected two main breastfeeding outcomes, namely: the duration of breasting and the likelihood of ever breastfeeding. Using the timing of the program’s implementation and the geographic variation in where services were located, I employ a difference-in-differences specification to identify a causal impact of the program on breastfeeding. I find that there is a roughly 5% decrease in the likelihood of ever breastfeeding associated with the increased access to health care. I find no impact of the program on the duration of breastfeeding for those who choose to breastfeed. These findings are robust to a placebo check and are unlikely to be driven by changes in female employment. Even with Armenia’s strong son-preference, I find no strong evidence of a differential impact for male versus female children though this may be due to a lack of precision among the disaggregated estimates. One mechanism that is likely contributing to this decrease is the documented lack of supportive practices for breastfeeding in the region’s medical centers, which I verify using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys.

Asian Americans, even those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, achieve extraordinary educational outcomes, defying the expectations of the well-established status attainment theory that family background is strongly associated with educational attainments. This phenomenon is known as the Asian American Achievement Paradox (AAAP). Positive selectivity of Asian immigrants and cultural accounts are two competing explanations, but they are rarely disentangled empirically due to the high collinearity between immigrant selectivity and culture. This study offers a modified version of cultural explanations, clarifies the distinctions between competing explanations based on the same criteria, and tests them by investigating the educational achievements of second-generation Asian Americans using the full-count 1940 Census matched to the 1930 Census. During this period, Asian immigrants were not hyper-selected, so the entanglement of immigrant selectivity and culture is less of a concern. The results are largely consistent with the cultural explanation, revealing the AAAP to be a century-old phenomenon with a previously unknown complexity. The transmission of culture from the society of origin is further evident in that the AAAP is limited to East Asians and does not apply to Filipino Americans, even though contextual selectivity in education is similar across Asian ethnic groups in 1940.

In contrast to earlier US policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the “Indian Problem,” the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty—making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)—and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides quantitative evidence on the demographic impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 US population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased the American Indian child mortality ratio by a little more than 15%. In secondary analyses (requiring additional assumptions) focused on total mortality, we find increases among young American Indians of nearly one-third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%). These results confirm contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.