Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I improvements in transportation and communication encouraged increasing interregional and international economic integration. This paper traces and analyzes the progress of increasing labor market integration in the...

According to most standard accounts of the mobilization of the U.S. economy in World War II, things started out badly because the agency nominally in charge, the War Production Board, lacked sufficient authority and relied on faulty techniques. But then the War Production Board installed the...

Antebellum critics of slavery argued that it was responsible for the relative inefficiency of free southern farms. We examine this issue, employing a stochastic production function, which allows us to distinguish between technological superiority and technical inefficiency, and controlling for...

We present evidence showing that the course of economic growth and of health, as measured by stature, Body Mass Index (BMI), mortality rates, or the prevalence of chronic conditions, diverged in the nineteenth century and converged in the twentieth. To analyze the change in welfare resulting...

Using the census survival method to calculate net flows across employment states between 1900 and 1910, we find that approximately one-fifth of all men who reached the age of 55 eventually retired before their death. Many of these retirees appear to have planned their withdrawal from paid...

Sectoral wage gaps for workers of comparable skill are central to issues in economic development and economic history. This paper presents new archival evidence on the farm-nonfarm wage gap for the United States just prior to the American Civil War. Measured at the level of local labor markets,...

Though the geographic, occupational, and financial mobility of average Americans were important aspects of nineteenth century U.S. economic development, the extent and correlates of this economic mobility have remained open to debate in the absence of individual- level longitudinal data. This...

This paper analyzes a five percent systematic sample of households from the manuscripts of the New York State Census of 1865 for seven counties (Allegany, Dutchess, Montgomery, Rensselaer, Steuben, Tompkins, and Warren). The sample was selected to provide a diversity of locations, settlement...

This paper makes use of hitherto untabulated data from the censuses of manufacturing for 1870 and 1880 to investigate the extent to which firms operated at less than their full capacity year round in these census years and thus provides some evidence of the extent to which workers may have faced...

This paper examines the U.S. economy in World War II. It argues that the mobilization must be viewed as a rapidly evolving historical process rather than, as is often the case a single undifferentiated event. For example, the employment of unemployed resources, a factor often cited to explain...