I am the Herman Lay Chair of Private Enterprise and Associate Professor of Economics at Baylor University.
I am also a Research Associate at the NBER.
You can contact me at: Zachary_Ward@baylor.edu.
Here is my CV.
Working Papers
1. Family Trees and Falling Apples: Historical Intergenerational Mobility Estimates for Women and Men, [updated] November 2024; [2023 NBER WP version]
with Kasey Buckles, Joseph Price, and Haley Wilbert
2. The Gilded Age and Beyond: The Rise and Fall of the Economic Elite in American History, [updated] April 2025
with Priti Kalsi
3. Like Great-Grandparent, Like Great-Grandchild? Multigenerational Mobility in American History,
May 2025
with Kasey Buckles and Joseph Price
4. The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics, February 2025
with Nick Huntington-Klein, Claus Pörtner, and the Many-Economists Research Collective
5. Women's Economic Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration, April 2025
Publications
1. The Impact of Violence on the Dynamics of Migration: Evidence from the Mexican Revolution,
with David Escamilla-Guerrero and Ed Kosack
The Journal of Development Economics, September 2025
2. Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century,
with Rowena Gray, Siobhan O'Keefe, and Sarah Quincy
forthcoming at The Journal of Human Resources
3. Intergenerational Mobility in American History: Accounting for Race and Measurement Error, [online appendix]
The American Economic Review, December 2023
Media: The Weeds, Marginal Revolution, Hutchins Roundup (Brookings)
4. Internal Migration, Education and Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from American History,
The Journal of Human Resources, November 2022
5. Immigrants and Cities during the Age of Mass Migration, with Katherine Eriksson
Regional Science and Urban Economics (Special Issue: Urban Economics and History), May 2022
6. Life after Crossing the Border: Assimilation during the First Mexican Mass Migration,
with David Escamilla-Guerrero and Ed Kosack, Explorations in Economic History, October 2021
7. El sueño americano? The generational progress of Mexican Americans prior to World War II, with Ed Kosack
The Journal of Economic History, December 2020
8. The Not-So-Hot Melting Pot: The Persistence of Outcomes for Descendants of the Age of Mass Migration,
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020
Media: AEA Research Highlight
9. The low return to English fluency during the Age of Mass Migration,
European Review of Economic History, May 2020
10. The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940 (with Katherine Eriksson)
The Journal of Economic History, December 2019. Data
Media: VoxEU
11. International Migration in the Atlantic Economy 1850-1940 (with Timothy J. Hatton)
Handbook of Cliometrics, 2018
12. Age at Arrival and Assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration (with Rohan Alexander)
The Journal of Economic History, September 2018. Data
13. Birds of Passage: Return Migration, Self-Selection and Immigration Quotas
Explorations in Economic History, April 2017
14. Immigration Quotas, World War I, and Emigrant Flows from the US in the Early 20th Century (with Michael J. Greenwood)
Explorations in Economic History, January 2015
15. Who Crossed the Border? Self-Selection of Mexican Migrants in the Early 20th Century (with Edward Kosack)
The Journal of Economic History, December 2014
Other Publications
16. Book Review of Streets of Gold by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan,
The Journal of Economic History, September 2022 [book review]
17. The Circular Flow: Return Migration from the United States in the Early 1900s
The Journal of Economic History, June 2016 [dissertation summary]
Not-as-active Working Papers
1. There and Back (and Back) Again: Repeat Migration to the United States, 1897-1936, March 2016 [email for draft]
