Fortunate Sons: Elite Political Selection in American History
This draft subsumes and substantially expands on NBER WP 26156. For research assistance, the authors thank Brittany Dutton, Qianmin Hu, Elise Kostial, Anna Nakai, Conor Orton, Josh Rose, and Anish Sundar, as well as Joseph Price’s Record Linking Lab at BYU. For helpful discussion, the authors thank Ran Abramitzky, Avi Acharya, Alberto Alesina, Sam Bazzi, Matilde Bombardini, David Broockman, Jacob Brown, Nick Carnes, Dan Carpenter, Karen Clay, Cesi Cruz, Ernesto Dal Bó, Robert Erikson, Martin Fiszbein, Anthony Fowler, Matt Gentzkow, Liz Gerber, Rob Gillezeau, Ed Glaeser, Claudia Goldin, Josh Goodman, Justin Grimmer, Alisa Hall, Tarek Hassan, Seth Hill, Brian Knight, Shiro Kuriwaki, Eddie Lazear, Greg Martin, Jaakko Meriläinen, Christopher Muller, Suresh Naidu, Paul Novosad, Max Palmer, Daniele Paserman, Vincent Pons, Joseph Price, Hunter Rendleman, Dominic Rohner, Jesus Rojas Venzor, Wendy Schiller, Benjamin Schneer, Jesse Shapiro, Erik Snowberg, Jim Snyder, Marco Tabellini, Chris Tausanovitch, Danielle Thomsen, Francesco Trebbi, Jessica Trounstine, Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Zachary Ward, Ruthie Zussman, the students of Econ 220 in the Fall 2018–2019 quarter, seminar participants at BU, UBC, the Stanford Economics Brown Bag Lunch, the NBER Spring Political Economy Conference, the members of Stanford’s Democracy Policy Lab, the Center for Effective Lawmaking Conference, the 2019 Congress and History conference at MIT and Harvard, the University of Toronto Economic History Conference, and the Harvard Political Economy Seminar. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
