Research 

Presentations: NBER DAE SI (2025), Opportunity Insights Conference (2025), Paris School of Economics Economic History Seminar, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics Gender Conference (2024), EHA Annual Conference (2024), Cliometric Conference (2024), Chicago Federal Reserve, Harvard Graduate Economic History Workshop, Yale Economic History Workshop

Abstract: We document that women’s economic mobility improved nearly a century before married women gained broad labor market opportunities. Using Massachusetts marriage registers linked to U.S. censuses (1850–1920), we create new father–child links for women to estimate intergener- ational mobility and assortative mating, overcoming a key historical linkage barrier. Estimates from a structural marriage market model suggest assortative mating fell 61% from 1850–1870 to 1900–1920. Counterfactuals imply women’s mobility would have been far lower absent the decline in assortative mating. Had late cohorts faced early cohort sorting, the rank–rank slope between a woman’s father and husband would have been 2.5 times higher.

Abstract: We introduce a new rule-based linking algorithm for historical Census records. We augment earlier ABE algorithms based on name, age and place of birth (Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson, 2012), with five matching characteristics – middle initial, county of residence, and spouse and parents’ names. Relative to basic ABE, ABE-Extra Information (“ABE-EI”) greatly increases match rates, improves accuracy and is similarly representative of the population on most attributes, with geographic mobility being one important exception. Relative to machine learning algorithms, ABE-EI has somewhat lower match rates, similar accuracy, improved representativeness, and offers full replicability.