Research

Working Papers

Wheels of Change: 

The Impact of the Automobile in the Early 20th century United States 

with Silvia Farina

The 20th century marked a dramatic transformation in the US urban landscape, mainly driven by technological advances that reshaped daily life and economic activity. Among these, the automobile stands for an unprecedented pace and scale of adoption. This paper provides the first systematic evidence on how the automobile’s uniquely rapid diffusion between 1910 and 1930 reshaped U.S. cities. By digitizing historical car registration records and linking them with decennial census data, we ask whether the arrival of the automobile triggered residential decentralization and urban sprawl, and whether it contributed to rising spatial inequality and segregation.  At the individual level, we digitize car registration records and link them to full-count census data. This enables us to characterize the socioeconomic profile of early adopters and track their residential mobility. At the city level, we construct a new panel dataset of U.S. cities and we examine changes in population density and spatial distribution, income gradients, and racial/ethnic segregation as a function of automobile registrations per capita. To get consistent within-city spatial measures over time, we develop an algorithm to geocode historical census data. To address endogenous car adoption, we propose a Difference-in-Differences design that leverages the exogenous shock of the Ford Model T’s introduction in 1908 and cross-sectional variation in cities’ capacity to adapt to this innovation. We find preliminary evidence that automobile adoption induced a de-concentration of cities cores. In particular, we find that high levels of automobile suitability correspond to a five percent increase in entropy, which measures how spread out the city population is, and a ten to twenty percent reduction in the share of population living within 2 miles from the CBD.

The Urban Mortality Transition and the Transformation of the American City: 1900-1930

Slides, draft coming soon

Between 1900 and 1930, the mortality rates in US cities fell dramatically. Part of this decline was caused by investments in public health infrastructures, such as the opening of a water filtration plant, which reduced overall mortality by 5%.  In this paper, I study the economic consequences of improvements in urban health. I combine data on mortality rates with data on wages and employment from the Census of Manufacturing. I instrument for the mortality in a city using the mortality in cities lying upstream of the same river. First, I find that mortality reduces the population’s growth rate. Second, I find that high-skill workers are more responsive than low-skill workers to urban mortality rates; high-skill wages are positively affected by high mortality rates, while I cannot reject a zero effect of mortality on low-skill wages. Cities with high mortality rates have a smaller ratio of high- to low-skill workers and a higher ratio of high- to low-skill wages. I complement the reduced-form evidence with a Rosen-Roback model which allows me to compute the amenity value by skill group for each city across time. I find that mortality has a negative impact on the amenity value of a city only for high-skill workers. Finally, I use the model to estimate the returns to the opening of a filtration plant.

The Impact of Religious Persecution on Scientific Progress: The Case of the Spanish Inquisition

Latest version

This study investigates the influence of the Spanish Inquisition on suppressing scientific progress during the 16th and 17th centuries in Spain. By analyzing data on Inquisition trials, the research reveals that locations with more intense Inquisition activity experienced a significant decline in the production of local scientists. The Inquisition played a detrimental role in hampering scientific development, particularly in areas where scientific activity had been growing previously. Notably, this negative effect persisted for at least 150 years after the Inquisition’s establishment. The decline in scientific production was specific to science and was not the consequence of a general economic downturn, and no significant impact was observed on the production of creatives involved in liberal arts. These results contribute to the understanding of the interplay between religious institutions, intellectual progress, and scientific advancement

during this crucial historical period.

Self-Selection of International Migrants across Multiple Locations within Destination Country

Draft upon request

Published Papers