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Newsletter
How Common Was Blockbusting in the Postwar U.S.?
Bennett, Katherine; Hartley, Daniel; Rose, Jonathan D. (2022-07-01)
This article documents the prevalence of blockbusting—the orchestration of racial turnover in urban neighborhoods—throughout many major U.S. cities from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 468 , Pages 6

Working Paper
Health Insurance and Hospital Supply: Evidence from 1950s Coal Country
http://fedora:8080/fcrepo/rest/objects/authors/; http://fedora:8080/fcrepo/rest/objects/authors/ (2020-04-17)
The United States government spends billions on public health insurance and has funded a number of programs to build health care facilities. However, the government runs these two types of programs separately: in different places, at different times, and for different populations. We explore whether access to both health insurance and hospitals can improve health outcomes and access to health care. We analyze a coal mining union health insurance program in 1950s Appalachia with and without a complementary hospital construction program. Our results show that the union insurance alone increased ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-033

Working Paper
The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains
Gillezeau, Rob; Feir, Donna; Jones, Maggie E. C. (2019-01-14)
In the late 19th century, the North American bison was brought to the brink of extinction in just over a decade. We show that the bison?s slaughter led to a reversal of fortunes for the Native Americans who relied on them. Once the tallest people in the world, the generations of bison-reliant people born after the slaughter were among the shortest. Today, formerly bison-reliant societies have between 20-40% less income per capita than the average Native American nation. We argue that federal Indian policy that limited out-migration from reservations and restricted employment opportunities to ...
Center for Indian Country Development series , Paper 1-2019

Working Paper
Immigration Disruptions and the Wages of Unskilled Labor in the 1920s
Biddle, Jeff; Cohen, Elior (2022-09-27)
An era of mass immigration into the United States ended with the onset of World War I in Europe, followed by the passage of restrictive immigration laws in 1921 and 1924. We analyze various sources of wage data collected in the 1910-1929 period to explore the impact of this significant disruption of the flow of immigration on the wages of unskilled labor. Our approach to identification entails examining differences in wages across local labor markets and industries differentially exposed to the disruptions in immigration due to different ethnic compositions oftheir immigrant populations in ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 22-12

Working Paper
Occupational Switching During the Second Industrial Revolution
Hobijn, Bart; Kaplan, Robert S. (2024-02-07)
During the Second Industrial Revolution, in the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of automation technologies coincided with substantial job creation but also a “hollowing out” of middle-skilled job opportunities, which historically offered reliable paths to prosperity. We use recently linked U.S. census data to document three main facts: (i) declining demand for middle-skilled labor in manufacturing corresponded to greater reallocation of workers into comparatively less-skilled occupations; (ii) older workers were more likely to switch to unskilled physical labor; (iii) younger ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2024-01

Discussion Paper
Fight the Pandemic, Save the Economy: Lessons from the 1918 Flu
Verner, Emil; Luck, Stephan; Correia, Sergio A. (2020-03-27)
The COVID-19 outbreak has sparked urgent questions about the impact of pandemics, and associated countermeasures, on the real economy. Policymakers are in uncharted territory, with little guidance on what the expected economic fallout will be and how the crisis should be managed. In this blog post, we use insights from a recent research paper to discuss two sets of questions. First, what are the real economic effects of a pandemic—and are these effects temporary or persistent? Second, how does the local public health response affect the economic severity of the pandemic? In particular, do ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20200327

Working Paper
Up in Smoke: The Impact of Wildfire Pollution on Healthcare Municipal Finance
Lopez, Luis; Murphy, Dermot; Tzur-Ilan, Nitzan; Wilkoff, Sean (2025-01-09)
Wildfire smoke pollution is associated with significantly higher healthcare municipal borrowing costs, amounting to $250 million in realized interest costs for high-smoke counties in 2010–2019, and an estimated $570 million over the following 10 years. These costs are disproportionately higher in high-poverty or high-minority areas where there is more smoke-related uncompensated care. Out-of-state smoke is also associated with higher borrowing costs, suggesting poor wildfire management imposes externalities on nearby states. Our hospital-level analysis shows increases in asthma cases and ...
Working Papers , Paper 2503

Working Paper
Worker and Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Classified Advertisements
Traum, Nora; Woodward, Greg; Petrosky-Nadeau, Nicolas; Bi, Huixin (2025-07-16)
We present new monthly city-level and national measures of worker and firm search from 1900 to 1938, derived from scanned images of U.S. newspapers. To our knowledge, we are the first to systematically use the “situations-wanted” advertisements placed by job seekers. We document fresh insights into early 20th-century labor market dynamics: (1) worker and firm search efforts are procyclical; (2) posting costs affectadvertising behavior and labor search intensity; (3) the Beveridge curve is stable over the last 125 years, with similar shifts following the 1918 flu and Covid-19 pandemic; and ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 25-07

Working Paper
Immigration Restrictions and the Wages of Low-Skilled Labor: Evidence from the 1920s
Biddle, Jeff; Cohen, Elior (2025-02-25)
This paper examines how the U.S. immigration restrictions of the 1920s affected the wages of low-skilled workers using newly digitized annual wage data from 1910 to 1930. Exploiting variation across local labor markets, we find that wages for low-skilled workers rose faster in areas more affected by the restrictions. These wage effects emerged early in the 1920s and persisted throughout the decade across manufacturing, construction, and agricultural sectors. Our findings help explain previously documented internal migration patterns and demonstrate how reduced immigration affected labor ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 22-12

Working Paper
The Evolution of U.S. Educational Mobility over the 20th Century and the Role of Public Education
Mohnen, Paul; Shariq Mohammed, A.R.; Bailey, Martha (2026-01-12)
We construct two new large-scale datasets to measure relative and upward educational mobility by sex, race, class, and childhood county of residence for cohorts born in 1910–1919 and 1982–1997. We show that both relative and upward educational mobility rose over the 20th century, with historically disadvantaged groups experiencing the largest gains. We also document substantial geographic convergence over the 20th century: both within and across regions, where children live matters much less for their educational mobility today than it did at midcentury. Using a state-border design, we ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2026-1

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