The use of quantitative methods in leading historical journals increased dramatically in the 1960s and declined sharply after the mid-1980s. The JIH is an invaluable source for analysis of the boom and bust in the use of quantitative methods in history; the journal remained under the same editors for almost fifty years and made no attempt to change editorial policies during that period. Shifting patterns of content and authorship in the JIH from the 1980s to the early 2000s reveal how the journal responded to a dramatic decline in quantitative submissions by U.S.-based historians. Recent years have seen a revival of quantification both in the JIH and in mainstream historical journals, especially among historians located at institutions outside the United States.

This paper identifies intermarriage (between non-citizens and citizens) as an important response mechanism to intensified immigration enforcement, particularly among Mexican non-citizens. Exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the implementation of interior immigration enforcement from 2005 to 2017, we find that a one standard deviation increase in enforcement raises Mexican non-citizens’ likelihood of marrying a U.S. citizen by 3 to 6 percent. Our results show that this effect is driven by a change in spousal preference. Both police-based and employment-based enforcement contribute to this impact. The analysis adds to a growing literature examining how immigrants respond to tightened enforcement and, importantly, sheds light on the recent growth of intermarriage among Mexican immigrants.

The authors compile large data sets from Norwegian and US historical censuses to study return migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913). Norwegian immigrants who returned to Norway held lower-paid occupations than did Norwegian immigrants who stayed in the United States, both before and after their first transatlantic migration, suggesting they were negatively selected from the migrant pool. Upon returning to Norway, return migrants held higher-paid occupations relative to Norwegians who never moved, despite hailing from poorer backgrounds. These patterns suggest that despite being negatively selected, return migrants had been able to accumulate savings and could improve their economic circumstances once they returned home.

U.S. military veterans are a large and racially heterogeneous population. There are reasons to expect that racial disparities in mortality among veterans are smaller than those for non-veterans. For example, blacks are favorably selected into the military, receive relatively equitable treatment within the military, and after service accrue higher socioeconomic status and receive health and other benefits after service. Using the 1997–2009 National Health Interview Survey (N = 99,063) with Linked Mortality Files through the end of 2011 (13,691 deaths), we fit Cox proportional hazard models to estimate whether racial disparities in the risk of death are smaller for veterans than for non-veterans. We find that black/white disparities in mortality are smaller for veterans than for non-veterans, and that this is explained by the elevated socioeconomic resources of black veterans relative to black non-veterans. Leveraging birth cohort differences in military periods, we document that the smaller disparities are concentrated among All-Volunteer era veterans.

This article investigates whether the increasing ‘residual wage inequality’ trend, which is responsible for most of the wage inequality phenomenon, is related to manufacturing decline and the influx of low-skilled immigrants. The analysis exploits variation across locations in the United States, and shows that a shrinking manufacturing sector increases inequality. This effect strengthens with an influx of low-skilled immigrants. Similar results are found for the increasing return to education and the decline in the employment rate. The evidence suggests that manufacturing decline is producing downward pressure on the relative wages of workers at the low end of the income distribution.

Young adults often co-reside with their parents in response to economic distress (Furstenberg, 2010; Settersten & Ray, 2010), although for some, it is their preferred living arrangement. Not all young adults who co-reside with a parent are single, some are cohabiting or married. By using the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) detailed information on both marital and cohabiting partners (which are not available in either the Decennial Census or the American Community Survey), we produce detailed information on young adult parental co-residence by relationship status from 2007 through 2018. We define parental co-residence as living with one’s own parent(s) or a partners/spouse’s parent(s).

The construction of wind turbines is a highly contested political issue due to the perceived negative externalities that these turbines create. Opposition groups share common complaints and concerns that nearby turbines will negatively affect their property values. This paper analyzes how the installation of a wind turbine affects nearby property values at the zip code level. Using a difference-in-difference model across zip codes throughout the entire continental United States, this paper finds results that suggest there is no perceivable effect from the construction of wind turbines on the price per square foot of nearby homes.

Fifty years after the adoption of the 1968 Fair Housing Act that prohibits discrimination in the housing market, homeownership rates have not increased for Black or Hispanic households. The current homeownership rate for Black households is 42 percent, identical to the 1970 census reported level, and 48 percent for Hispanic households, lower than that in 1970. Using data from the 1989, 2005, and 2013 American Housing Surveys, we identify the extent to which group differences in household endowments account for persistently low minority homeownership levels.

Local land use regulation may restrict housing supply, with more stringent regulation associated with higher local housing prices, as demonstrated by the empirical literature. Nonetheless, demand spillover to surrounding communities, may moderate local house price increases. We develop and test a model for how spillovers affect local price outcomes. Using data for California, we show that relative income and relative restrictiveness matter for the impact of local regulation on local housing prices.

This paper examines if internal migrants at the turn of the 20th century have influenced the long-term economic development of the counties where they settled over 100 years ago. Using Census microdata from 1880 and 1910, the distance travelled by American-born migrants between birthplace and county of residence is examined to assess its relevance for the economic development of US counties today. The settlement patterns of domestic migrants across the 48 continental states are then linked to current county-level development. Factors influencing both migration at the time and the level of development of the county today are controlled for. The results of the analysis underline the economic importance of internal migration. Counties that attracted American-born migrants more than 100 years ago are significantly richer today. Moreover, distance is crucial for the impact of internal migration on long-term economic development; the larger the distance travelled by domestic migrants, the greater the long-term economic impact on the receiving territories.

Experiment participants were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowdsourcing platform that has been extensively used in social science research in recent years. MTurk allows researchers to recruit participants to perform tasks such as filling out surveys and opinion polls, participating in experiments, or coding the content of documents. Researchers advertise their studies as a human intelligence task (HIT) on MTurk, and participants choose only those HITs that interest them, given the promised price and estimated duration of the task. We listed a link to our survey on MTurk on March 22–23, 2018, and offered participants $0.75 for successfully completing the study. We estimated that the survey would take 5 minutes to complete and paid participants the equivalent . . .

This paper examines how the price of home heating affects mortality in the US. Exposure to cold is one reason that mortality peaks in winter, and a higher heating price increases exposure to cold by reducing heating use. It also raises energy bills, which could affect health by decreasing other health-promoting spending. Our empirical approach combines spatial variation in the energy source used for home heating and temporal variation in the national prices of natural gas versus electricity. We find that a lower heating price reduces winter mortality, driven mostly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes.

Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have become increasingly popular in the United States1 and are advertised as a potentially safe and useful method of smoking cessation, despite unknown long-term health sequelae.2,3 Individuals with cancer are particularly sensitive to the harms of active smoking, thus smoking cessation is a critical component of cancer survivorship.4 However, the patterns and implications of e-cigarette use in patients with cancer are not well known. Therefore, we examined contemporary trends of conventional smoking and e-cigarette use among patients with cancer.

This study for the first time addresses generation effects on eight entrepreneur types across four U.S. generations: Traditionalists, Boomers, Gen‐Xers, and Millennials. It adopts hierarchical age‐period‐cohort (HAPC) models using multilevel mixed‐effects logistic regression models with random period effect controls and the same‐age comparison between two neighboring generations. The empirical study relies on monthly Current Population Survey data across 11 years (2006–2016). When controlling for age, period, path dependency, seasonality, and other demographic and socioeconomic factors, no generational differences are identified for workers' entrepreneur propensity, mirroring entrepreneurs' misfits; for entrepreneur‐type propensities, limited generation differences are identified: the odds for Gen‐Xers to be novice (vs. non‐novice) entrepreneurs are 10% higher than Boomers for the ages of 44 and 51; the odds for Boomers to be opportunity (vs. necessity) entrepreneurs are 2.3 times higher than Traditionalists for the ages 63–70. The limited generational difference is consistent with prior literature using HAPC.

Building upon endogenous growth theory, we show a causal impact of immigration on innovation and dynamism in US counties. In order to identify the causal impact of immigration, we use 130 years of detailed data on migrations from foreign countries to US counties to isolate quasi-random variation in the ancestry composition of US counties that results purely from the interaction of two forces: (i) changes over time in the relative attractiveness of different destinations within the US to the average migrant arriving at the time and (ii) the staggered timing of arrival of migrants from different origin countries. We then use this plausibly exogenous variation in ancestry composition to predict the total number of migrants flowing into each US county in recent decades. We show four main results. First, immigration has a positive impact on innovation, measured by patenting of local firms. Second, immigration has a positive impact on measures of local dynamism, as endogenous growth theory predicts. Third, the positive impact of immigration on innovation percolates over space, but spatial spillovers quickly die with distance. Fourth, the impact of immigration on innovation is stronger for more educated migrants.

As the population of older Americans grows larger and more diverse, there is a growing need for stronger legal protection against labor market discrimination targeting this group. This paper discusses the existence and effect of such labor market discrimination against older minority workers in the United States and explains how the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) fails to adequately protect such workers. Older minority Americans may face labor market discrimination due to their age, their race, and the combination of those two factors. However, the ADEA is not designed to protect against discrimination at the intersection of multiple identities. Although minorities have brought an increasing proportion of age discrimination claims and an increasing number of cases allege multiple bases of discrimination, plaintiffs face legal barriers and a low success rate. The ADEA specifically limits enforcement on claims where age constitutes one of multiple factors, rather than the only factor, leading to an adverse employment action, meaning that the law does not support combined age and race claims. However, other federal and state laws protecting against age discrimination may provide better relief for older minorities facing age and race discrimination.

Most new firms are founded by former employees of existing firms - spinouts. This paper studies the relationship between employer size and spinout entry, size and growth. Using micro-data from Mexico, we document a negative relationship between employer size and spinout entry. That is, employees from small firms are more likely to form spinouts than those from large firms. Second, we uncover a positive relationship between employer size and spinout size both at entry and over the lifecycle. Spinouts from large employers start at a larger scale and grow faster than spinouts from small employers. Although a qualitatively similar relationship is observed in data from the U.S., there are large quantitative differences in the levels of spinout formation. To understand the impact of these differences on aggregate outcomes, we build a model of occupational choice and firm dynamics in which workers can learn from and adopt the productivity of their employers to form their own firms. In this framework, differences in the rates of spinout formation between Mexico and the U.S. are driven by differences in the efficiency with which employees learn from their employers. We interpret this efficiency as representing a form of managerial quality. The model, calibrated to match spinout entry rates across the two countries, can account for 13 and 19% of the cross-country variation in output per worker and firm growth respectively. These findings highlight the relevance of spinouts for aggregate outcomes, and the potential for managerial quality to not only impact incumbent firms but also future entrants.

Unrestricted availability of datasets is important for researchers and decision makers to evaluate their strategies to solve certain problems. Equally important is the privacy of the respective data owners. Synthetically generated datasets provide a way to retain the utility of the original data keeping the privacy of the owners invulnerable. We perform a comparative study of synthetic data generation techniques using different data synthesizers like decision tree, ran- dom forest and neural network. We evaluate the effectiveness of these methods towards the amount of utility they preserve and the risk of disclosure.

For dual-career couples, "two-body" or "co-location" problems may put their relationships and careers in conflict. This paper uses data from the 2000 United States census to estimate the probability of non-cohabitation among married, college-educated workers and to examine the association between non-cohabitation and three proxies for career-related location constraint: education beyond college, the geographic mobility of workers in a person's occupation, and the geographic clustering of workers in the occupation. I find that non-cohabitation is unusual but not unknown among highly educated workers; the prevalence of non-cohabitation among all college-educated workers was 1.9 percent, and the prevalence was as high as 2.8 percent for women and 4.2 percent for men under 30. Consistent with the idea that some couples live apart to solve a dual-career location problem, I also find that non-cohabitation is more common among workers with higher levels of education and workers in occupations with high degrees of geographic clustering. Contrary to my expectations, however, I find that non-cohabitation is less prevalent among workers in occupations with high rates of geographic mobility.

Long-term residence in neighborhoods is thought to promote the development and maintenance of supportive relationships and trust. These strong social ties may, however, be limited in communities in post-industrial cities characterized by high levels of vacant properties. This study aimed to examine the relationship between neighborhood vacancy and mental health with adjustment for length of residence and possible moderation by social (dis)integration in a sample of Flint, MI, residents. We found that short-term (but not long-term) increases in neighborhood vacancy were associated with poorer mental health, after adjustment for individual covariates. When considering neighborhood vacancy, length of residence and individual covariates, however, the only significant association detected was between higher social disintegration and lower wellbeing. This effect was direct and not mediated by other factors. In this way, it appears that the social conditions of neighborhoods may be important, particularly in places that have experienced declines in the built environment. In addition, we identified evidence that social integration moderates the relationship between neighborhood vacancy and mental health outcomes. The level of neighborhood vacancies had a weaker relationship to wellbeing among those with higher levels of social ties. But none of the independent variables in our study were able to predict social integration, highlighting some potential areas for future research. From these findings, we posit that establishing strong social connections can buffer residents against negative mental health outcomes, and health promotion efforts could usefully assist in maintaining social ties among neighbors.