This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns.

This paper examines the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the Second Intifada. Using data on the daily number of fatalities between September 2000 and January 2005, we estimate reaction functions for both Israelis and Palestinians and find evidence of Granger causality from Palestinian to Israeli violence, but not vice versa. This finding is consistent using either the incidence or level of fatalities and is robust to the specification of the lag structure and the level of time aggregation. We find no evidence that the Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in a predictable “tit-for-tat” cycle of violence.

In this study we extend our previous work to examine the dynamic relationship between violence committed by Palestinian factions and that committed by Israel during the Second Intifada. We find a statistically significant relationship between Israeli fatalities claimed by groups associated with the ruling political party, Fatah, and subsequent Palestinian fatalities. We do not find a similar relationship for Israeli fatalities claimed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian factions. We conjecture that these differences are due to the different positions of the factions vis-à-vis bargaining over a two-state solution to the conflict as well as the organizational structures of the factions.