During the nineteenth century, the US manufacturing sector shifted away from the "hand labor" mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to the "machine labor" of the factory. This was the focus of an extremely detailed but extraordinarily complex study by the Commissioner of Labor...

We use establishment-level data to study capital deepening -- increases in the capital-output ratio -- in American manufacturing from 1850 to 1880. In nominal terms, the aggregate capital-output ratio in our samples rose by 30 percent from 1850 to 1880. Growth in real terms was considerably...

We use data from the manuscript censuses of manufacturing for 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 to study the dispersion of average monthly wages across establishments. We find a marked increased in wage inequality over the period, an increase that cannot be explained by biases in the data or changes in...

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...

The consensus view among economic historians is that wage inequality in American manufacturing followed an inverted-U path from the early nineteenth century until just before World War Two. The previous literature, however, has been unable to fully document this path over time, or fully assess...

The long-standing view in US economic history is the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the artisan shop to the mechanized factory led to "labor deskilling." Craft workers were displaced by mix of semi-skilled operatives, unskilled workers, and a reduced force of mechanics to...