Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020

We thank William Darity, Jr., Anne Hannusch, Damon Jones, Trevon Logan, Robert Margo, Suresh Naidu, Martha Olney, Fabian Pfeffer, David Romer, Emmanuel Saez, William Spriggs, Jón Steinsson, Alan Taylor, Gabriel Zucman, and members of the Economics of Racism, UC Berkeley Economic History, MIT Sloan Finance, Stanford Labor and Economic History, UC Santa Barbara Broom Center, Oxford Economic History, and Columbia Macro seminars, among others, for valuable feedback. We also thank all participants of the NBER Race and Stratification program meeting, the NBER Summer Institute Development of the American Economy program meeting, the NBER Fall Public Economics program meeting, and the ASSA 2022 annual meeting. We thank Soumyajit Mazumder for generously sharing data for the state of Georgia; we thank Geoff Clarke for sharing data on the balance sheets of Black banks in Virginia and for providing us with valuable insights on Black financial wealth during the 1930s; and we thank Luis Bauluz and Alice Henriques Volz for sharing data and code. Victoria Agwam, Isbah Bandeali, Santiago Deambrosi, Kendra Marcoux, Will McGrew, and Moritz Scheidenberger provided outstanding research assistance. This work is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation (Award # 2011-29464) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2126/1 – 3“ 390838866 and the CRC TR 224. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• online appendix