Objective To examine if exposure to residential redlining practices by HOLC in 1940 is associated with increased risk of death later in life. Design, Setting, and Participants The study linked individuals who resided within HOLC-graded neighborhoods (defined as Census Enumeration Districts) in 1940 with administrative death records data. The study estimated hazard ratios as well as age-specific life expectancy gaps (at age 55, 65, and 75 years) for HOLC grading exposure. This was done using methods that adapted standard parametric survival analysis to data with limited mortality coverage windows and incomplete observations of survivors. The analysis sample consisted of 961 719 individual-level observations across 13 912 enumeration districts within 30 of the largest US cities (based on 1940 population counts) across 23 states. Data were analyzed between December 1, 2023, and September 4, 2024. Main Outcome and Measures The exposure was HOLC grade based on historic HOLC maps, with A representing “best” or creditworthy areas; B, “still desirable”; C, “definitely declining”; and D, “hazardous” areas not worthy of credit (ie, redlined), and the main outcome was age at death from the Social Security Numident file. Results The 961 719-person individual sample had a mean (SD) age of 19.26 (9.26) years in 1940 and a mean (SD) age at death of 76.83 (9.22) years. In a model adjusted for sex (52.48% female; 47.52% male), race and ethnicity (7.36% African American; 92.64% White), and latent place effects, a 1-unit lower HOLC grade was associated with an 8% (hazard ratio, 1.08 [95% CI, 1.07-1.09]) increased risk of death. At age 65 years, these hazard differentials translated into an estimated life expectancy gap of −0.49 (95% CI, −0.56 to −0.43) years for each 1-unit decrease of the HOLC grade. Conclusion This study found that individuals who resided within redlined neighborhoods in 1940 had lower life expectancy later in life than individuals who resided within other HOLC-graded areas.

In the early 1900s, telephone operation was among the most common jobs for American women, and telephone operators were ubiquitous. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T undertook one of the largest automation investments in modern history, replacing operators with mechanical switching technology in over half of the U.S. telephone network. Using variation across U.S. cities in the timing of adoption, we study how this wave of automation affected the labor market for young women. Although automation eliminated most of these jobs, it did not reduce future cohorts’ overall employment: the decline in operators was counteracted by employment growth in middle-skill clerical jobs and lower-skill service jobs, including new categories of work. Using a new genealogy-based census-linking method, we show that incumbent telephone operators were most affected, and a decade later more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or no longer working

As both a marriage act and an immigration act, the Expatriation Act of 1907 restricted U.S. women’s freedom of marriage by stating that marrying aliens would lead to loss of U.S. citizenship. To study the effects of the Expatriation Act, I conduct a statistical analysis using 1910 full-count U.S. census data. I find that the Expatriation Act of 1907 generated significantly negative effects on intermarriage between American women and foreign-born men, particularly noncitizens. In particular, I find that it was the citizenship, rather than men’s non-U.S. origin, that accounted for the negative effects of the Expatriation Act of 1907 on intermarriage. These results show a decline in male immigrants’ marital assimilation, and potentially social and economic assimilation. As for the magnitude, the effects were large: the decline in intermarriage was at least 15 percent relative to the pre-Act intermarriage rate. Besides these main results, selective emigration to Canada and Europe driven by intermarriage cannot explain the main empirical results of the paper. The Expatriation Act of 1907 also had no significant effects on women’s entry into the marriage market. Finally, the effects of the Expatriation Act of 1907 on intermarriage were heterogeneous by family immigration background, but less so by geographic region.

Lasting changes in women’s employment followed the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States. In the decades before the pandemic, consistently fewer women reported an occupation in cities that would go on to have longer interventions targeted at curbing influenza. This gap narrowed after the pandemic, and by 1930 cities with longer interventions experienced a 3.9 percentage point improvement in women’s employment rates on average, relative to cities with shorter interventions. These gains were concentrated in cities in which women had the right to vote prior to 1920.

This doctoral dissertation in economics examines the diffusion of automobiles and motortrucks on American farms in the early- and mid-20th century – specifically, the impact of last-mile all-weather road access on said diffusion, and the impact of the diffusion of these technologies (and of tractors, electrification, and education) on agricultural productivity. This dissertation also examines the impact of group identity on the decisions of citizens and economic agents as they consider agreements to fully integrate capital, labor, and trade flows between a developed country and a developing country (as has occurred in the European Union). In the U.S., automobiles and motortrucks all but replaced railroads for long-distance travel, both passenger and freight. The pace of diffusion was likely powerfully influenced by access to all-weather roads and farmers were among the early adopters of automobiles and motortrucks. In developing countries today, there is tremendous growth in the sales of motor vehicles, but lack of last-mile road access slows the diffusion of motor vehicles on farms. The results from IV regressions suggest that improved all-weather road access increased usage of automobiles by 3.6% and of motortrucks by 4.2%, and that there was significant heterogeneity in the impact of road access by the types of crops and farm products produced. Automobiles, tractors, and education were found to have contributed to agricultural productivity in the U.S. during most of the years we examine, but motortrucks contributed to agricultural productivity in three years but detracted from it in four years, and electricity detracted from agricultural productivity as many years as it contributed. Automobiles, tractors, and electrification were found to be largely land-saving technologies. Tractors and electrification were largely labor-expanding, and automobiles and education were labor-saving in most of the years examined but labor-expanding in a few years. International agreements liberalizing capital, labor, and trade flows often fail to be adopted or are withdrawn from, despite overwhelming consensus by economists that they boost the national incomes of all participating nations. Understanding the impact of group identity on political decisions in favor or against economic integration is critical to understanding events such as the Brexit withdrawal and various nativist movements surging throughout the developed world. Inducing group identity was found to decrease the probability that integration is achieved. This is largely driven by what happens in the developed country, where inducing group identity decreases the probability that a majority of voters support integration by a large amount. Holding wage rates fixed, inducing group identity increases implemented tax rates in the developing country under autarky but decreases them under integration, and decreases implemented tax rates in the developed country under both scenarios. Holding wage rates and tax rates fixed, inducing group identity increases the amount of labor subjects were willing to supply. However, in none of these cases was the magnitude of the effect statistically significant.

Married women in the early 20th century U.S. faced “marriage bars,” a form of employer discrimination that barred them from paid employment. However, because the end of marriage bar use coincided with shifting social norms and labor market conditions, it is unclear how the end of marriage bars affected women’s employment. We study the effects of the legislative prohibition of marriage bars in teaching during the 1930s. A difference-in-differences design shows that the prohibitions increased the share of married women teachers, partly by pushing unmarried women out of the labor force, and modestly increased women’s labor force participation.

Higher levels of body mass index (BMI), particularly for those who have obesity defined as class II and III, are correlated with excess risk of all-cause mortality in the USA, and these risks disproportionately affects marginalized communities impacted by systemic racism. Redlining, a form of structural racism, is a practice by which federal agencies and banks disincentivized mortgage investments in predominantly racialized minority neighborhoods, contributing to residential segregation. The extent to which redlining contributes to current-day wealth and health inequities, including obesity, through wealth pathways or limited access to health-promoting resources, remains unclear. Our quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the generational impacts of redlining on wealth and body mass index (BMI) outcomes. We leveraged the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps to implement a geographical regression discontinuity design, where treatment assignment is randomly based on the boundary location of PSID grandparents in yellowlined vs. redlined areas and used outcome measures of wealth and mean BMI of grandchildren. To estimate our effects, we used a continuity-based approach and applied data-driven procedures to identify the most appropriate bandwidths for a valid estimation and inference. In our fully adjusted model, grandchildren with grandparents living in redlined areas had lower average household wealth (β = − $35,419; 95% CIrbc − $37,423, − $7615) and a notably elevated mean BMI (β = 7.47; 95% CIrbc − 4.00, 16.60), when compared to grandchildren whose grandparents resided in yellowlined regions. Our research supports the idea that redlining, a historical policy rooted in structural racism, is a key factor contributing to disparities in wealth accumulation and, conceivably, body mass index across racial groups.

This dissertation expands the concept of rural resilience to include the agricultural sector in the historical and contemporary context of the US. Across three essays, the topics include inter-generational occupational choices, migration decisions, farmland consolidation, structural transformation, and rural mortality. In the first essay, I study the Dust Bowl’s impact on inter-generational occupational choices in US agriculture. Using US full-count census panel data from 1920 to 1940 and a difference-in-difference design, I find that occupational persistence rates decreased by 2%. Children of farmers were 15% less likely to become self-employed farmers and 10% more likely to become paid farm workers. Additionally, children who migrated out of Dust Bowl-affected areas were 77% more likely to work off-farm. This study suggests that the Dust Bowl contributed to the structural transformation of the US economy in the 20th century.

In 2023, Florida enacted a controversial law prohibiting foreigners from purchasing real estate, ostensibly for national-security reasons. However, this legislation disproportionately targets individuals from Asian countries and risks creating a chilling effect on all Asians. Similar laws passed by other states echo this trend, unfortunately mirroring historical patterns of discrimination. The efforts, however, are not the first efforts targeting Asians. California and other states enacted alien land laws during the first half of the twentieth century. Rooted in deep-seated anti-Asian sentiments and hostilities, particularly directed at Japanese Americans, these laws combined a toxic blend of racism and xenophobia, further marginalizing Asians socially, politically, and economically. While instigated by the anti-Japanese movement, California’s law broadly applied to all aliens ineligible for citizenship -- a category exclusively encompassing Asians.

I examine the effect of a woman-friendly occupation on employment by exploring a unique historical setting-the postmaster occupation during the early twentieth-century United States. Unlike many occupations that established practices to prevent married women from entering , postmasters were open to married women and offered flexible work arrangements and equal pay. With a novel dataset on postmaster appointments and census linking, I show that postmasters attracted qualified women who were not gainfully employed previously. However , the postmaster occupation offered women few benefits beyond the appointed term. Taking advantage of the fact that postmasters were presidential appointees and were rarely re-appointed after the party of the president changed, I compare the 1940 outcomes of women appointed just before and after the 1933 presidential transition in a regression discontinuity (RD) design. The RD estimates suggest that women experienced a 26.7 percentage points reduction in gainful employment after finishing their postmaster term. The negative employment effect is unique to women and does not apply to men appointed under the same circumstances. In addition, I show that women postmasters were not more likely to be employed than their women neighbors who had never been postmasters, despite their work experience. The lack of benefits for women's future employment is in part explained by state-level discrimination against married women working and the severity of the Great Depression.

In my first chapter, I study the effect of the expansion of the streetcar network on suburbanization and socioeconomic dynamics of neighborhoods. My novel data work involves georeferencing historical streetcar maps of Chicago for three decadal years- 1900,1910 and 1920. To study the streetcar impact on changes in a neighborhood over time, I divide the city into consistent hexagons and study the changes within each hexagon. Using different empirical methodologies such as two-way fixed effects and first differences including an instrumental variable, I find that streetcars played a significant role in shaping suburbanization. I find that streetcars played a significant role in city expansion, with population increasing in the suburbs particularly near streetcar lines, away from the city center. Results indicate that due to streetcar expansion, the rich moved away from the city center but settled near streetcars, while the poor clustered in the city center and near the public transit network. In my second chapter, co-authored with my advisor, Professor David Cuberes, we explore the streetcar network for the city of Boston. We study the impact of the streetcar network on housing prices in the late 19th century. Using a novel data approach along with georeferencing the streetcar network of Boston, we collect data on housing prices and their characteristics from newspaper advertisements during that time. We find that housing prices are cheaper the farther we move from the city center and the rich prefer to live far from the city center but near streetcars, similar to the results of my first chapter. My third paper explores a rich new global dataset of over 2.2 million notable people born between 3500 BC to 2018 AD. I focus on the persistence of concentration of famous artists over time during the Renaissance and Early Modern Period in Europe between 13th to 18th century. Using a panel data of several European cities, I use two-way fixed effects estimation and find the significant presence of persistence in agglomeration of artists within a city over time, confirming the importance of urban networks.

Between the mid-19th and mid-20th century, the US transformed from an agricultural economy to the frontier in science, technology and industry. We study how the US transitioned from traditional craftsmanship-based to today's science-based innovation. To do so, we digitize half a million pages of patent yearbooks that describe inventors, organizations and technologies on over 1.6M patent and add demographic information from US census records and information on corporate research activities from large-scale repeated surveys on industrial research labs. Starting in 1920, the 19th-century craftsmanship-based invention was, within just 20 years, overtaken by a rapidly emerging new system based on teamwork and a new specialist class of inventors, engineers. This new system relied on a social innovation: industrial research labs. These labs supported high-skill teamwork, replacing the collaborations within families with professional ties in firms and industrial research labs. This shift had wide-ranging consequences. It not only altered the division of labor in invention, but also reshaped the geography of innovation, reestablishing large cities as epicenters of technological progress and introduced new barriers to patenting for women and foreign-born inventors that have persisted into the 21st century.

In contrast to earlier United States 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 new quantitative evidence on the impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 U.S. population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased various measures of American Indian child and adult mortality from nearly 20% to as much as one third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%) —confirming contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.

This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the historical evolution of African American-owned banks in the U.S. and their long-term role in addressing the racial wealth gap. Utilizing a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the effects of Black bank openings and closures on African American homeownership across U.S. counties over the long run. Our findings demonstrate that Black banks significantly fostered homeownership, a vital driver of wealth accumulation, in the regions they operated. In contrast, their closures had a disproportionate effect, causing a decline in African American homeownership. [88 words]

This paper investigates the impact of the American Civil War on mobilization for women’s suffrage in the US. I construct a new dataset of soldiers enlisted in the Union army and their wartime experience, and locate them to their town of residence. Leveraging variation in casualty rates, I show that people from towns with more casualties were less likely to petition for women’s suffrage in the following years, consistent with a narrative that major events such as the Civil War can reallocate limited political attention and capacity, elevating some causes, while sidelining others. I find evidence of two possible mechanisms through which casualty rates drive these results. Firstly, Northern towns with higher casualties were more attune to the salience of Black rights, which the Civil War was fought over, resulting in a prioritization of this movement over women’s suffrage. Secondly, the collective trauma of casualties resulted in a tightening of pre-war gender norms of separate spheres that were not welcoming of female political empowerment.

Legislative policies that criminalize immigrants have a “chilling effect” on public program participation among eligible immigrants. However, little is known about the effect of local enforcement actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In this study, we linked county-level data on the number of detainer requests (or immigration holds) issued by ICE to individual-level data from the 2011, 2016, and 2019 American Community Surveys. We fit adjusted logistic regression models to assess the association between detainer requests and enrollment in Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) among those likely eligible for each program in US-born versus immigrant households. A higher volume of detainer requests was associated with lower enrollment in both Medicaid and SNAP, particularly among adults in households with at least one immigrant relative to US-born households. We observed the most pronounced effects in 2011 and 2019.

This paper investigates the effects of restrictive immigration policies enacted in the US in 1921 and 1924 to explore the effects of immigration restrictions on recent immigrants using full-count US Census data and variation across national origins in the exclusionary policies. Immigrants more affected by the quotas were more likely to become naturalized citizens. Immigrants from countries that subsequently had migration reduced by the Acts were also more likely to marry someone born in the United States. The evidence in this paper, taken together, shows that the Immigrant Exclusion Act hastened the assimilation of already-landed immigrant men and impacted their short and long-run family outcomes.

The popularity of cohabitation for US adults of all ages has continued to grow in recent years. For older men and women(aged50+)in2000,thenumberofcohabitorswasabout1.2million,or1.6%ofadultsinthatgroup(Brown, Bulanda, & Lee 2005). As of 2022, this number has almost quadrupled to 4,205,505. We find that among older adults more men (2,216,977) are cohabiting than women (1,988,528). This sex difference is especially pronounced when comparing cohabitation rates (number of cohabitors per 1,000 unmarried and separated). The cohabitation rate is higher among older men at 118.2 than women at 67.17. This rapid growth is evidence cohabitation has become a more common experience for today’s older adults. A majority of older cohabitors are Non -Hispanic White (69%) with the next closest racial/ethnic group being 14% of older adult cohabitors being Hispanic. 10% were non-Hispanic Black, 4% were non-Hispanic Other race, and 3% were non-Hispanic Asian. Drawing on 2022 American Community Survey (ACS) data, we examine variation in cohabitation trends for older US adults by geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic characteristics. First, we present state variation in cohabitation rates which represent the number of older adult cohabitors per 1,000 unmarried and separated older adults. Second, we examine how poverty rates and marital histories of cohabitors compare to those who are single and married.

The failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank (FSB), one of the only Black-serving banks in the early post-bellum South, was an economic catastrophe and one of the great episodes of racial exploitation in post-Emancipation history. It was also most Black Americans' first experience of banking. Can events like these permanently alter financial preferences and behavior? To test this, we examine the impact of FSB collapse on life insurance-holding, an accessible alternative savings vehicle over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We document a sharp and persistent increase in insurance demand in affected counties following the shock, driven disproportionately by Black customers. We also use FSB migrant flows to disentangle place-based and cohort-based effects, thus identifying psychological and cultural scarring as a distinct mechanism underlying the shift in financial behavior induced by the bank's collapse. Horizontal and intergenerational transmission of preferences help explain the shock's persistent effects on financial behavior.

Question 20 on the 1870 US Census asked respondents if they had been denied the right to vote. The Census Office told Congress in 1871 that 40,800 men answered yes to the question. The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) one percent sample of the 1870 entries projected 29,900 affirmative answers. By contrast, Ancestry.com counted more than 125,000 ‘yes’ answers. The three tallies stem from different assumptions about how to enter data from the manuscript pages. Researchers using the MPC 1% sample and the Ancestry.com full count sample should be aware of the different assumptions about how to enter data. The differences also indicate a need for a fourth count that captures the complexity of the asking and answering of question 20.