Does opening the door to US citizenship for unauthorized immigrants cause out-of-control “chain migration”? We address this question using variation from the legalization programs of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Exploiting IRCA’s introduction and differences across metropolitan areas in program intensity, we estimate that each IRCA-legalized Mexican was responsible for the subsequent immigration and legal admission of one relative, in total, through 2019. Most sponsored relatives were immediate family, and the adult sponsorship rate is inconsistent with out-of-control chain migration. Estimates using cross-country variation are substantively similar and suggest limited demand for reunification of extended families.

In the late 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a campaign to equalize Black and white teacher salaries in the de jure segregated schools of the American South. We estimate the effect of teacher pay on educational attainment exploiting variation in Black salary gains over time across Southern counties with different Black enrollment shares and across states by whether subsequent policy reinforced or resisted court rulings favorable to the NAACP. Using newly collected county panel data, we find that Black teacher salary gains contributed to the large reductions in racial inequality in school enrollment and grade progression in the South at midcentury.

The introduction and diffusion of personal computers are widely viewed as a technological revolution. Using U.S. metropolitan area–level panel data, this paper asks whether links between PC adoption, educational attainment, and the return to skill conform to a model of technological revolutions in which the speed and extent of adoption are endogenous. The model implies that cities will adjust differently to the arrival of a more skill-intensive means of production, with the returns to skill increasing most where skill is abundant and its return is low. We show that the cross-city data fit many of the predictions of the model during the period 1980–2000, the PC diffusion era.

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital and skill in manufacturing using immigration-induced variation in skill mix across U.S. counties between 1860 and 1930. We find that capital initially complemented both high- and low-skill labor (determined by literacy) and, unlike today, was more complementary with low-skill labor. Around 1890, capital increased its relative complementarity with high-skill labor. Simulations calibrated to our estimates imply the level of capital-skill complementarity after 1890 allowed the manufacturing sector to absorb the large wave of Eastern and Southern European immigrants with only a modest decline in less-skilled relative wages. This would not have been possible under the older production technology.

This paper examines how a large conditional grants program influenced school desegregation in the American South. Exploiting newly collected archival data and quasi-experimental variation in potential per-pupil federal grants, we show that school districts with more at risk in 1966 were more likely to desegregate just enough to receive their funds. Although the program did not raise the exposure of blacks to whites like later court orders, districts with larger grants at risk in 1966 were less likely to be under court order through 1970, suggesting that tying federal funds to nondiscrimination reduced the burden of desegregation on federal courts.

An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous technical advance raise the possibility of limited or even perverse impact. We study a natural policy experiment: the exclusion of almost half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States to improve farm labor market conditions. With novel labor market data we measure state-level exposure to exclusion, and model the absent changes in technology or crop mix. We fail to reject zero labor market impact, inconsistent with this model.