Leah Platt Boustan

Using records digitized in part by amateur genealogists, economists have upended conventional wisdom about which immigrants succeed and why.

What Southern dynasties’ post-Civil War resurgence tells us about how wealth is really handed down.

Compared to 19th-century arrivals, today's new arrivals are much more likely to be at the extreme ends of the earnings spectrum.

White families quickly recuperated financial losses after the Civil War, then created a Jim Crow credit system.