Hello! I’m a Postdoctoral Fellow advised by Claudia Goldin. My research looks at how we can learn from messy historical data. I received my PhD in economics from Harvard in 2024. Here’s my cv.

This summer, I will join the Market Development team at ISO New England.

Send me a note at: ramattheis [at] gmail.com

Working Papers

Spurious Mobility in Imperfectly Linked Historical Data draft R package

Abstract: When was the United States a land of opportunity? This paper revisits the history of intergenerational mobility in the US accounting for the impact of imperfectly linked census data. Incorrectly linked observations typically attenuate ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates, such as the association of income ranks among fathers and sons. This attenuation exaggerates levels of mobility, as mobility is inversely related to the strength of the relationship between parents’ and children’s outcomes. I address bias due to imperfectly linked data from the perspective of nonclassical measurement error and propose a class of models for misclassification—error in discrete data—that rely on a repeated, conditionally independent measure of the misclassified variable. A natural source for such a repeated measure can be found by linking observations into an additional sample. In a validation exercise, the proposed estimator reduces bias by 50-90% relative to OLS, with a larger reduction in bias on more severely misclassified samples. After correcting for misclassification error, estimates of the rank-rank slope of occupation status for White men born between 1832 and 1910 are 50-100% higher than OLS estimates, depending on the cohort. Revised estimates suggest a U-shape pattern for intergenerational mobility in US history. Individuals born before the Civil War experienced levels of mobility comparable to the present, while those born between the Civil War and WWI—who entered the workforce during the highest levels of inequality in the US before the present—experienced lower levels of mobility than in any region in the US today.

There’s No Such Thing As Free Land: The Homestead Act and Economic Development with Itzchak Raz draft

Work in Progress

Our Crowd? Intra-ethnic Frictions in Immigrant Assimilation with Sara Benetti and Elijah Locke