We study the joint process of urbanization and industrialization in the US economy between 1880 and 1940. We show that only a small share of aggregate industrialization is accounted for by the relocation of workers from remote rural areas to industrial hubs like Chicago or New York City. Instead, most sectoral shifts occurred within rural counties, dramatically transforming their sectoral structure. Most industrialization within counties occurred through the emergence of new "factory" cities with notably higher manufacturing shares rather than the expansion of incumbent cities. In contrast, today's shift towards services seems to benefit large incumbent cities the most.

According to new assimilation theory, assimilation can entail not only the adoption, by immigrants, of the established population's cultural practices, but also the adoption, by the established population, of immigrants' cultural practices. However, empirical research on assimilation has either neglected adaptation on the part of the established population or identified only modest changes. We examine reactions to a massive and rapid inflow of immigrants, and specifically, those of Mexican-origin Californios around the time of the Gold Rush of 1849. Treating naming patterns as indicators of assimilation, we find that Mexican American children born in California after 1849 were significantly less likely to receive distinctively Hispanic first names. As a placebo test, we further show that a similar pattern does not obtain in areas (e.g. New Mexico) that did not experience a rapid inflow of new American settlers. The findings validate an important insight of new assimilation theory, as well as shed new light on contemporary research on demographic change.

How do societies respond to adversity? After a negative shock, separate strands of research have documented either an increase in religiosity or a boost in innovation efforts. In this paper, we show that both reactions can occur simultaneously, driven by different individuals within society. The setting of our study is the Influenza pandemic of 1918-19 in the United States. To measure religiosity, we construct a novel indicator based on naming patterns, and we measure innovation through the universe of granted patents. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the pandemic, we provide evidence that more affected counties become both more religious and more innovative. Looking within counties, we uncover a heterogeneous response: individuals from more religious backgrounds further embrace religion, while those from less religious ones become more likely to choose a scientific occupation. Facing adversity widens the distance in religiosity between scientific-minded individuals and the rest of the population, and it leads to a polarization of religious beliefs.

The Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. These links allow researchers to construct a longitudinal dataset that is highly representative of the population, and that includes women, Black Americans, and other under-represented populations at unprecedented rates. In this paper, we describe our process for creating the Census Tree, beginning with a collection of over 317 million links contributed by the users of a free online genealogy platform. We then use these links as training data for a machine learning algorithm to make tens of millions of new matches. Finally, we incorporate other recent efforts to link the historical U.S. censuses and introduce a procedure for filtering the links and adjudicating disagreements. Our complete Census Tree achieves match rates between adjacent censuses that are between 69 and 86% for men, and between 58 and 79% for women, with over 41.5 million links for Black Americans.

How do ethnic and racial minorities go from underrepresented to proportionately – or perhaps even over – represented in local politics? This paper addresses this question by examining the ongoing incorporation of Latinxs and politicians in the strategic research site (SRS) of Central Falls, Rhode Island against the backdrop of the earlier incorporation of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as French Canada, who arrived in the “Ellis Island Era”. It employs mixed methods to demonstrate: first, that European-Americans entered politics as representatives of spatially segregated ethnic enclaves in the early 20th century; second, that in the absence of spatial segregation, Latinx politicians with distinct national origins had to await and ultimately foster the emergence of a coherent, panethnic community of voters before they could reach office; third, that the emergence of a panethnic political community was a nonlinear function of the Latinx share of the municipal population; and, fourth, that Latinx identity was in large part forged in and through public institutions, especially the public school system. In doing so, the paper helps overcome the "micro- macro divide” that has traditionally bedeviled political sociology and not only identifies but begins to address a major lacuna in the study of Latinx politics: while the literature assumes and addresses their historical underrepresentation in US politics, immigrants from Latin American and their offspring didn’t identify as members of a coherent panethnic group until recently – leaving the boundaries, and perhaps even the existence, of their underrepresentation open to question.

The three decades from 1940 through 1970 mark a turning point in the spatial scale of Black–White residential segregation in the United States compared with earlier years. We decompose metropolitan segregation into three components: segregation within the city, within the suburbs, and between the city and its suburbs. We then show that extreme levels of segregation were well established in most cities by 1940, and they changed only modestly by 1970. In this period, changes in segregation were greater at the metropolitan scale, driven by racially selective population growth in the suburbs. We also examine major sources of rising segregation, including region, metropolitan total, and Black population sizes, and indicators of redlining in the central cities based on risk maps prepared by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s. In addition to overall regional differences, segregation between the city and suburbs and within suburbia increased more in metropolitan areas with larger Black populations, but this relationship was found only in the North. In contrast to some recent theorizing, there is no association between preparation of an HOLC risk map or the share of city neighborhoods that were redlined and subsequent change in any component of segregation.

Economists have long recognized the importance of human capital in economic growth. In this series of papers, I study how various institutions of human capital formation affected economic development in a variety of contexts prior to 1900. These include both formal institutions of human capital formation such as universities and informal institutions such as apprenticeships. The first chapter examines the role of European universities during the late Middle Ages and early modern eras, starting with the creation of the University of Bologna in the late 12th century. These “formal” institutions of human capital focused on the teaching of law and supplied the civil service and justice systems of their home cities with trained legists. I find that cities which hosted universities had faster population growth than similar cities without universities, suggesting that universities were associated with higher levels of economic development. ix The second chapter contrasts the formal university with an informal human capital institution—the English apprenticeship. Though England was the cradle of Europe’s industrialization, it had far fewer universities per capita than peer nations on the continent. However, it had a well-developed system of apprenticeship which some scholars have theorized was the main means of human capital incubation and transmission during the Industrial Revolution. English cities with more apprenticeships during the 18th century tended to have a greater degree of labor force specialization in the mid-19th century. The final chapter examines the role of the land-grant college system, which was established in the mid-19th century in the United States. In addition to their primary role of providing postsecondary education to students, these institutions added a second channel for the creation of human capital: research to boost the productivity of the nation’s farms. American counties more firmly embedded within the land-grant college network tended to have a better-educated populace and a more specialized labor force; however, counties more exposed to land-grant colleges saw no improvements in agricultural productivity

Throughout US history, mothers played an important role in educating their children. However, this role is obscured because limitations in data and methods have prevented researchers from including women in intergenerational studies. By lever-aging data from Social Security applications, we build a large panel that tracks both men and women over time despite marital name changes. We measure intergenera-tional mobility as the share of variation in child outcomes explained by parental background (R 2), which we decompose into mothers' and fathers' separate contributions. We find that a mother's human capital is a key determinant of her child's outcomes, often surpassing the influence of fathers, especially for daughters and Black children. More generally, maternal human capital is more important for children with limited school access. Incorporating mothers' human capital suggests that, contrary to current evidence, intergenerational mobility increased over the 19 th century.

This paper analyses persistence and change in the regional league table of entrepreneurship performance in the United States in comparison with England and Wales and West Germany. It examines whether regional rankings in start-up and self-employment rates in the United States are as sticky over time as in these European countries over approximately century, half-century and 30-year periods, or whether the United States is different. It identifies the types of regions that improve markedly (“leapfroggers”) or decline sharply (“plungers”) in their league table positions and the reasons for these changes and compares the countries on these issues. The paper draws out policy implications on regional levelling-up of entrepreneurship activity. It also sets out an agenda for further research.

I examine the long-run impacts of a deskilling technology on workers and their children. The McKay stitcher dramatically changed shoe production in the late 19th century by replacing skilled artisans with machines and less-skilled workers. It was licensed in only a few counties and impacted workers across counties unevenly through the transportation network. More-exposed shoemakers left traditional shoemaking for lower wages and did not migrate. The transfer of occupation from father to son was disrupted,and the children of shoemakers entered lower income occupations. New entrants to shoe factories came from poorer and less educated families. Using a model of occupation selection, I infer the change in life-time earnings implied by the impact of the technology on occupation exit. I find that the most exposed shoemakers and their children lost 2.2and 2.5 years of wages, respectively.

Democratic theorists have long argued that states can create more resilient democracies through education. Educational investments are thought to produce more economic equality and instill in citizens greater capacity and responsibility to participate in politics. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design and township-level data from Antebellum New York State, we examine whether state funding for common schools led to higher voter turnout as well as higher earnings and lower inequality. Our estimates support the view that a participatory democratic culture emerged not only because of initial favorable endowments but also because of subsequent government decisions to fund education. New York townships that received more school funding later had higher median earnings, lower earnings inequality, and higher levels of voter turnout. Our findings support the view that maintaining democracy requires active investments by the state, something that has important implications for other places and other times—including today.

This technical report describes the creation of statistical weights for version 3.0CenSoc-Numident and CenSoc-DMF mortality datasets using vital statistics data from the National Center for Health Statistics. We describe the structure of CenSoc data, National Center for Health Statistics mortality data, and motivating issues for constructing these weights. We detail the weighting procedure for different groups of records in CenSoc data, and conclude by demonstrating the effect of weights on mortality estimation using a regression framework.

In the United States, much has been learned about the determinants of longevity from survey data and aggregated tabulations. However, the lack of large-scale, individual-level administrative mortality records has proven to be a barrier to further progress. We introduce the CenSoc datasets, which link the complete-count 1940 U.S. Census to Social Security mortality records. These datasets—CenSoc-DMF (N = 4.7 million) and CenSoc-Numident (N = 7.0 million)—primarily cover deaths among individuals aged 65 and older. The size and richness of CenSoc allows investigators to make new discoveries into geographic, racial, and class-based disparities in old-age mortality in the United States. This article gives an overview of the technical steps taken to construct these datasets, validates them using external aggregate mortality data, and discusses best practices for working with these datasets. The CenSoc datasets are publicly available, enabling new avenues of research into the determinants of mortality disparities in the United States.

Whether immigrants advance in labor markets during their lifetimes relative to natives is a fundamental question in the economics of immigration. We examine linked census records for five cohorts spanning 1850-1940, when immigration to the United States was at its peak. We find a U-shaped pattern of assimilation: immigrants were "catching up" to natives in the early and later cohorts, but not in between. This change was not due to shifts in immigrants' source countries. Instead, it was rooted in men's early-career occupations, which we associate with structural change, strengthening complementarities, and large immigration waves in the 1840s and 1900s.

This paper studies the long-term effects of in-utero and early-life exposure to pesticide use on adulthood and old-age longevity. We use the cyclical emergence of cicadas in the eastern half of the United States as a shock that raises the pesticide use among tree crop growing farmlands. We implement a difference-indifference framework and employ Social Security Administration death records over the years 1975-2005 linked to the complete count 1940 census. We find that males born in top-quartile tree-crop counties and exposed to a cicada event during fetal development and early-life live roughly 2.2 months shorted lives; those with direct farm exposure face a reduction of nearly a year. We provide empirical evidence to examine mortality selection before adulthood, endogenous fertility, and differential data linkage rates. Additional analyses suggests that reductions in education and income during adulthood are potential mechanisms of impact. Our findings add to our understanding of the relevance of early-life insults for old-age health and mortality.

We study the role of denominational competition in the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth-century United States. We document that nearly all colleges established in this period were affiliated with a Christian denomination. Empirical analysis reveals a robust positive relationship between the denominational fragmentation of the county and the number of colleges established. We take several steps to rule out competing explanations and also highlight the causal channel by utilizing two historical case studies. We conclude by estimating a model of school choice and showing that students exhibited strong preferences to attend same-denominational colleges in terms of willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-travel. Therefore, we argue that religious diversity softened the extent of tuition competition between institutions and precipitated an “excess” entry of schools.

This paper proposes a novel pre-processing technique to improve record linkage for historical Chinese populations. Current matching approaches are relatively ineffective due to Chinese-specific naming conventions and enumeration errors. This paper develops a three-step process that both triples the match rate over baseline and improves match accuracy. The procedures developed in this paper can be applied in part or in full to other sources of historical data, and/or modified for use with other character-based languages such as Japanese. More broadly, this approach suggests the promise of language-specific linkage procedures to boost match rates for ethnic minority groups.

Using state-year-level variation from the Great Depression we show that adverse economic conditions experienced in early life are associated with worse labor market outcomes in prime-age years and worse economic wellbeing, morbidity, and mortality at older ages. These effects become more pronounced as surviving cohort members age, suggesting disparities in the acceleration of age-related physiological damage. Using multiple data sources, we analyze potential mechanisms in childhood and midlife. After evaluating changes in fertility and mortality rates for Depressionera birth cohorts, we conclude that these effects likely represent lower bound estimates of the true impacts of the economic shock on long-term outcomes.

Economists have long recognized the importance of human capital in economic growth. In this series of papers, I study how various institutions of human capital formation affected economic development in a variety of contexts prior to 1900. These include both formal institutions of human capital formation such as universities and informal institutions such as apprenticeships. The first chapter examines the role of European universities during the late Middle Ages and early modern eras, starting with the creation of the University of Bologna in the late 12th century. These “formal” institutions of human capital focused on the teaching of law and supplied the civil service and justice systems of their home cities with trained legists. I find that cities which hosted universities had faster population growth than similar cities without universities, suggesting that universities were associated with higher levels of economic development. The second chapter contrasts the formal university with an informal human capital institution—the English apprenticeship. Though England was the cradle of Europe’s industrialization, it had far fewer universities per capita than peer nations on the continent. However, it had a well-developed system of apprenticeship which some scholars have theorized was the main means of human capital incubation and transmission during the Industrial Revolution. English cities with more apprenticeships during the 18th century tended to have a greater degree of labor force specialization in the mid-19th century. The final chapter examines the role of the land-grant college system, which was established in the mid-19th century in the United States. In addition to their primary role of providing postsecondary education to students, these institutions added a second channel for the creation of human capital: research to boost the productivity of the nation’s farms. American counties more firmly embedded within the land-grant college network tended to have a better-educated populace and a more specialized labor force; however, counties more exposed to land-grant colleges saw no improvements in agricultural productivity.

In this paper I aim to disentangle the mechanisms underlying the well-documented association between race and the location of waste management facilities (WMFs). To do so, I first study whether WMFs were more likely to be located in neighborhoods with a higher share of black population after controlling for relevant covariates. Secondly, I analyze the socioeconomic consequences following the introduction of WMFs. Using historical data from the 1920-1940 U.S. Censuses and GIS data from the Urban Transition Project, I focus on the cities of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Houston, and Nashville in the United States. The results suggest that, contrary to expectations, there was no targeting of predominantly black neighborhoods for WMF placement after accounting for other geographic and socioeconomic factors. Instead, a more flexible model reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship, indicating that neighborhoods with mixed racial compositions were most affected by the presence of WMFs. These findings are consistent with the potential existence of blocking coalitions based on race, implying that homogeneous racial neighborhoods could resist the establishment of WMFs. Furthermore, I explore the consequences of WMF introduction on the affected regions. I find a decrease in urban development, measured by a decline in population density, following the construction of WMFs. Additionally, I find evidence of an increase in the share of black population in the areas where WMFs were introduced. These findings are consistent with a white flight from the affected neighborhoods.