Estimated labor force participation rates among free women in the pre-Civil War period were exceedingly low. This is due, in part, to cultural or societal expectations of the role of women and the lack of thorough enumeration by Census takers. This paper develops an augmented labor force...

This paper is a review of the literature in economics up to the early 1980s on the issue of estimating the earnings return to schooling and labor market experience. It begins with a presentation of Adam Smith's (1776) analysis of wage determination, with the second of his five points on...