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Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity By Claudia Goldin Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021 Pp. xii, 325. $27.95 hardcover Over the past five decades Claudia Goldin has [...]

Teaching economic history requires the study of how to combine the economists' modeling and statistical methods with the methods used by historians and the other social sciences. It often involves learning how to search for quantitative data from a variety of sources and then building panel datasets that match the data found with existing datasets. Economic historians also must work with narrative sources to develop an understanding of the historical context and the political, social, and economic institutions that influence the research questions. In some settings, the analysis focuses fully on narrative evidence because it is the only material available. While modern studies are restricted because the future is unknown, economic history can examine issues in the short, intermediate, and long run. Economic history provides a rich palette for educating undergraduate students in economics and the social sciences. The field is even more interdisciplinary than the wedding of history and economics. In 1978, Nobel Laureate Douglass North described its task as the study of the performance and structure of economies through time. North's research agenda over the rest of his career combined politics, religion, perceptions, ideologies, the sociology of knowledge, and a variety of topics studied by scholars throughout the social sciences.

During the Great Depression, as today, migrants were accused of taking jobs and crowding relief rolls. At the time, protest concerned internal migrants rather than the foreign born. We investigate the effect of net migration on local labor markets, instrumenting for migrant flows to a destination with extreme weather events and variation in New Deal programs in typical sending areas. Migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work and/or access to relief jobs. Given the period?s high unemployment, these lost work opportunities were costly to existing residents.

During the late 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent of the observed concentration of black households in the lowest-rated zones. We also provide evidence that the Federal Housing Administration had its own mapping strategies when evaluating mortgages and relied relatively little on the HOLC maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]