There is a widespread belief, in scholarly literature, the popular press, and even incel ideology, that polygyny prevents many men from marrying, by skewing the sex ratios of marriage markets. In turn, high proportions of men permanently excluded from marriage are thought to lead to negative outcomes, such as increased rates of crime and conflict. We investigate the link between polygyny and unmarried men through a combination of formal demographic modeling and analysis of census data from 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, plus the historical United States. Our model demonstrates that marriage markets are skewed sufficiently feminine under a range of realistic demographic scenarios to support some level of polygyny without necessarily locking any men out of marriage. In fact, our empirical results show a negative association between the prevalence of polygyny and the prevalence of unmarried men at the sub-national level. This pattern is explained partly by differences in sex ratios across populations and partly by relatively strong pro-marriage norms increasing the overall rate of marriage in polygynous communities. These results challenge the “if one man marries two women, another man will go unmarried” mechanism that is commonly invoked to link polygyny to armed conflict, to argue for the evolutionary fitness of monogamy, and to bolster certain strains of incel ideology.

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.

This thesis consists of three essays that explore the direct and indirect implications of fiscal decentralization for firm relocations, labor mobility, and discretionary fiscal policies. The first chapter, “Taxed Out? How Early 20th Century Regional Tax Adoptions Shaped Interstate Firm Relocations”, estimates the causal effects of decentralized regional tax adoptions on firm relocations within the borders of a country. I rely on the unique historical setting of staggered and uncoordinated introductions of 16 state-level corporate income taxes in the early 20th century U.S. as a natural experiment. I use linked census data on employers and a gravity model to estimate interstate firm relocation responses to these tax adoptions. This framework allows me to account for the entire universe of time-varying location factors beyond taxation. With that, I quantify a 13.02% increase in firm flows between two states when the origin state adopts a corporate income tax of 2.5% on average. Heterogeneity in the introduced rates further allows to estimate the flow elasticity concerning a 1 ppt higher adopted rate to be 4.75%. The effects vary across sectors, finding that the main results are driven by manufacturing, mercantile, and service businesses.

The first chapter studies the long-run effects of displacement and neighborhood division by looking at individuals affected by the construction of the Interstate Highway System. I develop a novel method to identify affected individuals in the 1940 Census and link them to mortality records from 1995 to 2005. Using three complementary identification strategies, I find that displaced individuals die three months younger, are more likely to leave their neighborhoods, and reside in lower-socioeconomic areas at death. Highly localized spillovers show that individuals living within 100 meters of a highway are also more likely to relocate to lower-socioeconomic areas, yet they do not experience increased mortality. The neighborhoods where displaced individuals relocate explain 30% of the displacementmortality effect.

We present a Non-Linear Instrumental Variable (NLIV) structure for the analysis of intergenerational mobility consistent with the realities of mating and reproduction. Existing models of the transmission of (dis)advantage are special cases of this framework embodying specific assumptions, many of them testable. In analyses of intergenerational mobility in the U.S. 1870- 1979 and Spain 1700-1800, mothers contributed more than fathers to outcomes children’s in the former setting, but the reverse was true in the latter. We further show how consideration of assortative mating and the impact of mothers can produce novel conclusions regarding mobility levels, trends over time, and mechanisms

How did the US become a land of opportunity? We show that the country’s pioneering role in mass education was key. Unlike previous research, which has focused on father-son income correlations, we incorporate both parents in a new measure of intergenerational mobility that considers multiple inputs, including mothers’ and fathers’ human capital. To estimate mobility despite limitations in historical data, we introduce a latent variable method and construct a representative linked panel that includes women. Our findings reveal that human capital mobility rose sharply from 1850 to 1950, driven by a declining reliance on maternal human capital, which had been most predictive of child outcomes before widespread schooling. Broadening schooling weakened this reliance on mothers, raising mobility in both human capital and income over time.

Large numbers of Canadians, of both English and French descent, migrated to the United States between 1850 and 1930. In Canada, French-Canadian fertility and child mortality rates were about 50% higher than English Canadian rates. Although the English-Canadian and U.S. white population of native-born parentage experienced rapid fertility declines beginning in the mid to late nineteenth century, there is no sign of significant fertility decline among French Canadians before the twentieth century. We use the number of women’s children ever born and the number of surviving children in the IPUMS 1910 full-count census dataset to examine whether migration to the United States altered the timing of the demographic transition for French Canadians. We conduct multivariate analyses to examine correlates of child mortality and fertility (including separate analyses of birth spacing and stopping behaviors), focusing on variables related to the migratory experience. The results indicate that while large differentials in child mortality and fertility persisted between the French- and English-Canadian populations living in the United States, the mortality and fertility of second-generation French Canadians converged significantly toward English-Canadian levels. Other characteristics associated with greater integration into American society yield similar results, with women in exogamous unions, who could speak English, and who resided in enumeration districts with lower proportions of French Canadians experiencing significantly lower fertility and child mortality rates. As expected, the demographic regime of English-Canadian women was similar to US-born women of US-born parentage.

How does improving access to the supply of energy affect regional specialization in manufacturing?We evaluate the long-run employment impacts of pipelines constructed by the U.S. government during World War II to transport oil and gas from the oil fields of the Southwest to wartime industrial producers in the Northeast. The pipelines were built rapidly to connect end points along a direct path that minimized use of scarce construction materials. Postwar they were converted to supply en route customers, giving counties close to the pipelines access to a cheap and plentiful source of energy. Between 1940 and 1950, counties with better access to pipeline gas had larger increases in their share of employment in energy-intensive industries. These impacts persisted to the mid-1980s for all energy-intensive industries and to the late 1990s for the subset of industries intensive in the direct use of electricity, despite the disruptive effects of the 1970s energy crisis. Our findings are relevant for understanding energy-related path dependence in local economic development patterns and how government intervention in energy markets affects industry location in the short and long run.

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.

Many historical administrative documents, such as the 1940 census, have been digitized and thus could be merged with geographic data. Merged data could reveal social determinants of health, health and social policy milieu, life course events, and selection effects otherwise masked in longitudinal datasets. However, most exact boundaries of 1940 census enumeration districts have not yet been georeferenced. These exact boundaries could aid in analysis of redlining and other geographic and social contextual factors important for health outcomes today. Our objective is to locate and map a large set of 1940 enumeration districts. We use online resources and algorithmic solutions to locate and georeference unknown 1940 enumeration districts. We geocode addresses using the OpenCage API and construct “virtual” enumeration districts by using a convex hull algorithm on those geocoded addresses. We also merge in Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps from the 1930s to demonstrate how 1940 enumeration districts could be used in future work to examine the association between historic redlining and current health. We geocode 7,228,656 1940 census addresses from the largest 191 US cities in 1940 that contained 84% of the 1940 US urban population from the Geographic Reference File and construct 34,472 virtual enumeration districts in areas that had HOLC redlining maps. 18,340 virtual enumeration districts were previously unmapped, covering cities containing an additional 40% of the 1940 US urban population. Where virtual enumeration districts match with previously mapped districts, 96.8% of paired districts share HOLC redlining categorization. Researchers can use algorithmic methods to quickly process, geocode, merge, and analyze large scale repositories of historical documents that provide important data on social determinants of health. These 1940 enumeration district maps could be used with studies such as the Health and Retirement Study, Panel Study for Income Dynamics, and Wisconsin Longitudinal Study.

The essays in this dissertation concern the distribution of people and economic activity across space at the national, regional, and urban levels. The first chapter studies the consistent power law observed in city-size distributions across countries, often referred to as Zipf’s law. To study this phenomenon, we analyze a general spatial equilibrium framework with heterogeneous locations, where trade and the locational productivities and amenities are subject to random variation in geographic and climatic characteristics. We prove how population is distributed spatially due to such random variation across space, demonstrating how population is lognormally distributed within countries and that the largest locations, i.e. cities, within countries appear to follow a power law.

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, we find that most extremely wealthy individuals drop out of the top tail within their lifetimes. Yet, elite wealth still matters. We find a non-linear association between grandparental wealth and being in the top 1%, such that having a rich grandparent exponentially increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1%. Still, over 90% of the grandchildren of top 1% wealth grandfathers did not achieve that level.

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.

How did the US become a land of opportunity? We show that the country's pioneering role in mass education was key. Unlike previous research, which has focused on father-son income correlations, we incorporate both parents in a new measure of intergenerational mobility that considers multiple inputs, including mothers' and fathers' human capital. To estimate mobility despite limitations in historical data, we introduce a latent variable method and construct a representative linked panel that includes women. Our findings reveal that human capital mobility rose sharply from 1850 to 1950, driven by a declining reliance on maternal human capital, which had been most predictive of child outcomes before widespread schooling. Broadening schooling weakened this reliance on mothers, raising mobility in both human capital and income over time.

I study the economic returns to migration among Swedish immigrants in the United States in 1900 and 1910, by social class. Using linked data from full-count Swedish and US censuses via the Swedish Emigrant Register, I first estimate the rates of return to migration using two identification strategies, with the returns exceeding 60 percent, notably higher for migrants from lower social classes. Furthermore, most migrants did not experience substantial occupational upgrade compared to their brothers in Sweden, which suggests that while migration yielded sizeable economic returns, they were primarily due to higher US wages rather than occupational mobility.

The Great Fire of 1910 in the northwestern United States burnt more than 1.2 million hectares in just two days and stands as one of the largest wildfires ever recorded. While it is known for having led to the introduction of a rigorous fire suppression regime that lasted for much of the twentieth century, it also generated a considerable amount of smoke far beyond the burnt areas that is likely to have impacted the health of those exposed. This paper examines the short- and long-term impact of this firesourced smoke pollution on children, combining historical data with smoke emission and dispersion modelling. The econometric results indicate a 119% increase in excess mortality during the week of the fire and a decrease of 4–14% in later-life socioeconomic status scores 20 and 30 years after the event. This research offers novel insights into wildfire smoke repercussions on health and long-run human capital formation in a setting where avoidance behaviour was minimal.

A burgeoning social scientific literature on the place-based legacy of slavery has mostly overlooked the effect of slavery on incarceration, de- spite the fact that the intensity and racial disparity of US incarceration is often attributed to its history of slavery. I analyze data on incarcera- tion from 1840 to 2020 and show that the historic prevalence of slavery tends to be negatively associated with Black incarceration, especially under Reconstruction and Jim Crow (1870-1940). In line with recent work by Christopher Muller, I argue this is at least partly explained by white planters paying the fines of Black convicts, who would then have to work off the debt or suffer imprisonment. I conclude that the exist- ing literature is not wrong to assume that Southern incarceration was shaped by slavery. But it shaped it in surprising ways that previous work has often failed to identify.

Using novel occupational data from the U.S. between 1860 and 1940, we evaluate three of Adam Smith’s core propositions regarding the relationship between the division of labor, market size, innovation, and productivity. We first document significant growth in occupational diversity during this period using new measures of labor specialization that we construct from workers’ self-reported job titles in the decennial Census. Consistent with Smith’s hypotheses, we find strong empirical evidence that labor specialization increases with the extent of the market, is facilitated by technological innovation, and is ultimately associated with higher manufacturing productivity. Our findings also extend Smith’s narrative by highlighting the role of organizational changes and innovation spillovers during the Second Industrial Revolution. These results speak to the enduring relevance of Smith’s insights in the context of an industrializing economy characterized by large firms, complex organizational structures, and rapid technological change

We conduct the first modern econometric analysis of the historical deaf population in the United States by incorporating deafness into a model of human capital. We find that the deaf population invested less in observable educational and physical human capital. Lower literacy, employment, and occupational scores also suggest that unobserved human capital investments were not substantial enough to improve productivity to the level of the hearing population. States that subsidized schools for the deaf provided deaf people with improved social capital and access to intangible goods that they pursued at the cost of higher economic achievement. Finally, we argue that substantial lifecycle differences between the hearing and deaf populations have implications for unbiased school attendance and employment rate estimation.

We examine new datasets of records linked between the 1940 and 1950 US censuses to characterize selection into military service during World War II and to analyze differences in veterans’ post-war educational and labor market outcomes relative to nonveterans. Motivated by poten- tially disparate selection into and effects of service, we pay particular attention to groups distinguished by age, pre-war educational attainment, race, and nativity. We find that veterans were positively selected on pre-war educational attainment, but negatively or neutrally selected in terms of own or fathers’ pre-war labor market characteristics. Younger veterans fared better in terms of education and labor market outcomes in 1950 than nonveterans who were observa- tionally similar in 1940. Older veterans exhibited relative gains in education compared to observationally similar nonveterans, but not in labor market outcomes. Black veterans’ relative gains in education were large, but black veterans not in school were less likely to be employed than observationally similar nonveterans in 1950. All groups of veterans were more likely to be government employees after the war and were under-represented in self employment.