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I have a new working paper available. Its co-authored with Alicia Plemmons and Justin Callais. Its a very short one (i.e., a letter) that deals with intergenerational educational mobility and economic freedom. The link to the SSRN article is here and the abstract is below:

Using World Bank estimates of intergenerational educational persistence and mobility for multiple across the development spectrum, this paper finds that economic freedom noticeably improves educational mobility. This is probably because economic freedom increases the returns to education in ways that incentivizes greater investment in education.

I have a new working paper with Phil Magness. In this paper, we show a major methodological inconsistency in the estimates of income inequality produced by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez for the period from 1917 to 2020. The error is not just a level error but also a trend error. Below is the image that summarizes the paper. The abstract is right after and the link to the SSRN page can be found here.

Abstract: We present a new series for top income concentrations in the United States, using a consistent data construction methodology for the entire range of available data. This is meant to connect efforts that have separately considered pre-1960 and post-1960 inequality measures. Our series improves upon the series of Piketty and Saez (2003), correcting for data discontinuities induced by arbitrary choices that introduce distortions to their fiscal income denominator between the mid-1980s and the present. We then link our series with previous corrections to the Piketty-Saez series, creating a yearly estimate of top income concentration from 1917 to 2020. The results indicate more a more tempered rise in inequality in recent decades than the previous literature.

The journal Cliometrica sent me confirmation that they had accepted my paper on the economic consequences of the conquest of Quebec by the British in 1760. In the paper, I argued that the three main groups who advanced different positions regarding the effects of the conquest used the same lynchpin: engagement with markets. All groups (pessimists, minimalists, and optimists in my parlance) have mechanisms regarding the effects that assume that French-Canadians engaged to a different degree with markets after the Conquest. Optimists argued that they engaged more, minimalists argued that there were no changes and pessimists argued that there was a retreat into agrarianism.

As such, all three can be tested using trends in market integration over time and space. Greater market integration would rule out the minimalists and pessimists. As such, I conduct this test by using the price data I collected over the year. I find signs of strong market integration between 1760 and 1850 which is tied to modest economic growth. Consequently, I argue that we can rule out the idea that the Conquest was a bad. However, I point out that the evidence for arguing that the extent to which it was a benefit remains to be investigated. The abstract is below:

The British Conquest of Quebec in 1760 was a key moment in Canadian history as it marked the beginning of a tense coexistence between French and English Canadians. Many argue that the Conquest had strong economic consequences in the form of the relative poverty of the French settlers. The mechanisms proposed are manifold, but they all rely on a key feature: a retreat from the market by French farmers. Using 171 years of wheat price data for Quebec City and Montreal, I test whether there are any signs of this retreat from the market and instead find the opposite: over time, markets grew more integrated across regions. In fact, there are more signs of disintegration during the era of French rule. Additionally, over time, regional prices became better predicted by current prices elsewhere than by the lagged prices in the same region. By the 1830s, markets in Quebec were as well integrated as those in economies such as the United States, France, Britain and Germany. The evidence in this paper is consistent with recent empirical findings about Quebec’s economic history, and so I argue that the case for the Conquest’s initiation of the relative poverty of Quebec (also dubbed “economic inferiority” in the historiography) is non-existent. This does not exclude long-run consequences of the Conquest, but the correct answer must lie elsewhere than in conventional explanations.

New working paper, with Chandler Reilly of Metropolitan State University of Denver, that shows that while historians are left-leaning, they seem to be able to keep their priors in check when they produce research (on average). The abstract is below and the link to the SSRN article is here:

There is a widely-shared perception that history faculty in colleges and universities lean heavily to the left and that this has gotten worse since the 1970s. However, party affiliations or self-proclaimed ideological labels do not automatically imply that historians are unable to check their political views at the doors of their offices and classrooms. In this paper, we assess whether they do by using the rankings of presidential performance made by historians since Arthur Schlesinger’s survey in 1948. We combine these rankings with a “classical-liberalism” index constructed out of changes to size of government and trade tariffs. The index does not change over time as the presidents are fixed. However, because the historians change from survey to survey, unchecked biases would imply that the index has a negative impact on presidential scores. Increasingly unchecked biases would imply an increasingly larger penalty on presidential scores. This is how we can document whether political biases seep into academic work. Using multiple econometric specifications, we are unable to find strong evidence of a bias that is growing over time.

I was asked to write an entry for the Handbook of Cliometrics on the economic history of French-Canadians. Unfortunately, the Handbook has formatting guidelines that I noticed only after I had written my first draft. As such, I had to make significant cuts and that meant cutting multiple sources. This is unfortunate because I had written the entry as a roadmap to the literature leading to future research. As such, I kept the older version and submitted the new one. I make the “old” version available here on SSRN so that everyone can consult. The abstract is below:

This is a chapter entry (with more details and sources that had to be eliminated for formatting guidelines) for the Handbook of Cliometrics. It details research done in the last 40 years regarding the economic history of French-Canadians. The discussion of recent findings centers around the pattern of international income differences and their evolution over time.

Explanations of the poverty of French-Canadians that hinge on geography and culture appear to be empirically rejected. Institutional explanations such as intermittent warfare during the 17th and 18th centuries, the conquest of Quebec by the British in 1760, the role of seigneurial tenure and the role of the provincial jurisdiction over education in the 1867 British North America Act appear to form far stronger explanations. Seigneurial tenure and educational policies appear to be the most important of those.

Future research directions are then highlighted — notably the creation and extension of new and existing datasets.

Enjoy!