Katherine Eriksson

About

Katherine Eriksson is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at UC Davis. She is a specialist in applied microeconomics with research interests that encompass economic history, labor economics, development economics, and econometrics. Her research activities primarily focus on economic history and labor economics, and she has also investigated topics related to development economics. Her work has been published in prominent journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Development Economics. Professor Eriksson teaches courses in U.S. economic history and econometrics. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA, earned in 2013, along with a master's degree from UCLA, a master's in Agricultural Economics from Virginia Tech, and undergraduate degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford and Mathematics and Philosophy from Virginia Tech. She is a member of the UC Davis Graduate Placement Committee, the American Economic Association, the Cliometric Society, and the Economic History Association.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Machine Learning
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Mining
• Computer Science
• History
• Genealogy
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Automated Linking of Historical Data

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2021 · 189 citations

  The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage, performing a series of comparisons across methods and against hand linking. We have three main findings that lead us to conclude that automated methods perform well. First, a number of automated methods gene…

  DOI

• Do Immigrants Assimilate More Slowly Today than in the Past?

  American Economic Review Insights · 2020 · 141 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Using millions of historical census records and modern birth certificates, we document that immigrants assimilated into US society at similar rates in the past and present. We measure cultural assimilation as immigrants giving their children less foreign names after spending more time in the United States, and show that immigrants erase about one-half of the naming gap with natives after 20 years both historically and today. Immigrants from poorer countries choose more foreign names upon first a…

  DOI

• Finding John Smith: Using Extra Information for Historical Record Linkage

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-07-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access

  We introduce a new rule-based linking method for historical Census records.We augment earlier algorithms based on name, age and place of birth (Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson, 2012, or "basic ABE"), with five matching characteristics -middle initial, county of residence, and spouse and parents' names.Relative to basic ABE, ABE-Extra Information ("ABE-EI") greatly increases match rates, improves accuracy and is similarly representative of the population on most attributes, with geographic mobility…

  PublisherDOI

• Same Flavors, Different Taste Buds: Predicting Social Norms Across Cultures and Domains

  2025-06-26 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Social scientists have long sought to explain why social norms vary so dramatically across the globe, but creating predictive, falsifiable models has remained a major challenge. Here, we introduce and validate the Moral Flavors Model, a quantitative framework that accurately predicts a society's judgment of a specific behavior. Our model is built on two components: the intrinsic 'moral flavor' of a behavior (the type of concern it evokes, such as harm or impurity) and a society's 'moral taste' (…

  PublisherDOI

• Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1920

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-02-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We document that women's economic mobility improved nearly a century before married women gained broad labor market opportunities.Using Massachusetts marriage registers linked to U.S. censuses , we create new father-child links for women to estimate intergenerational mobility and assortative mating, overcoming a key historical linkage barrier.Estimates from a structural marriage market model suggest assortative mating fell 61% from 1850-1870 to 1900-1920.Counterfactuals imply women's mobility wo…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pontus Strimling

  156 shared

• B. Gustafsson

  University of Gothenburg

  128 shared

• A. J. Korn

  74 shared

• B. Carry

  73 shared

• S. Bertone

  Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino

  69 shared

• N. Christlieb

  66 shared

• Leah Platt Boustan

  Princeton University

  64 shared

• Timothy C. Beers

  63 shared

Awards & honors

• Cal Poly Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Gran…
• Finalist, Economic History Association's Alan Nevins Dissert…
• Elise Burman Fellowship, UCLA, 2012
• UCLA Center for Economic History fellowship, Fall 2012

Similar researchers at University of California, Davis

• Giovanni Perih-69
• Oscar Jordah-54
• Marianne Bitlerh-41