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• Case | HBS Case Collection | December 2011 (Revised September 2018)

  The Indian Removal Act and the 'Trail of Tears'

  Tom Nicholas, Ari Medoff, Raven Smith and Sam Subramanian

  Native Americans were subjected to a protracted and painful process of forced removal from their land. The case provides "first hand" evidence on the debate over Indian removal as it took place during the early nineteenth century. The first document is excerpted from Andrew Jackson's First Annual Message to Congress in 1829 and the second document from Jackson's Second Annual Message in 1830, the year the Indian Removal Act was passed. The third and fourth documents cover the Congressional debate over the relocation of Indians, which led to strong partisan splits and divisions between the North and the South. Document three is excerpted from Whig Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey's six-hour speech to Congress opposing Indian removal. Document four is excerpted from a speech by Senator John Forsyth, a Democrat and former Governor of Georgia who spoke in response to Senator Frelinghuysen's remarks. A final document presents the Cherokee perspective and the reasons for their opposition to removal as represented by a memorial letter, written to the United States Congress in 1829. A statistical portrait follows the documentary evidence.

  Keywords: History; Laws and Statutes; United States;

  Citation:

  Nicholas, Tom, Ari Medoff, Raven Smith, and Sam Subramanian. "The Indian Removal Act and the 'Trail of Tears'." Harvard Business School Case 812-079, December 2011. (Revised September 2018.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2018

  The Gender Gap In U.S. History

  Tom Nicholas and Sophie Kainen

  Citation:

  Nicholas, Tom, and Sophie Kainen. "The Gender Gap In U.S. History." Harvard Business School Case 819-051, September 2018.  View Details

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• Working Paper | 2018

  Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century

  Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas and Stefanie Stantcheva

  This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the 20th century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location, and patents of firms active in R&D since 1921; and a historical state-level corporate tax database since 1900, which we link to an existing database on state-level personal income taxes. Our analysis focuses on the impact of taxes on individual inventors and firms (the micro level) and on states over time (the macro level). We propose several identification strategies, all of which yield consistent results: i) OLS with fixed effects, including inventor and state-times-year fixed effects, which make use of differences between tax brackets within a state-year cell and which absorb heterogeneity and contemporaneous changes in economic conditions; ii) an instrumental variable approach, which predicts changes in an individual or firm's total tax rate with changes in the federal tax rate only; and iii) a border county strategy, which exploits tax variation across neighboring counties in different states. We find that taxes matter for innovation: higher personal and corporate income taxes negatively affect the quantity, quality, and location of inventive activity at the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, cross-state spillovers or business-stealing from one state to another are important, but do not account for all of the effect. Agglomeration effects from local innovation clusters tend to weaken responsiveness to taxation. Corporate inventors respond more strongly to taxes than their non-corporate counterparts.

  Citation:

  Akcigit, Ufuk, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas, and Stefanie Stantcheva. "Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 24982, September 2018.  View Details

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