Although workers, employers, and insurance companies by 1910 supported the adoption of workers' compensation, they fiercely debated the specific features of the legislation. In this paper we examine how workers' compensation benefit levels were determined in the political process of forging...

Since One Kind of Freedom was published in 1977 there have been enormous advances in computer technology and statistical software, and an impressive expansion of micro-level historical data sets. In this essay we reconsider' our earlier findings on the consequences of emancipation in terms of...

It has been argued that Gresham's Law, bad money (money with a low value in non-monetary uses) drives out good, often fails because one money can circulate at its market value. Various cases involving the U.S. dollar in the nineteenth century have been cited as possible violations of the law...

From 1885 to 1902 manufacturers and distributors in the American bromine industry cooperated to increase prices and profits. Like many sectors of the American economy at the time, the bromine industry was made up a large number of small manufacturers and a small number of national distributors....

This paper begins the task of explaining why the American business elite has remained white, male and mostly native-born Protestants for a century, as verified in a previous paper (Temin, 1997). I argue that the evidence is inconsistent with the hypotheses that the stability is due to...

There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description, represented by the views of Ashton and Landes, sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has...

Debate over the economic convergence of currently industrialized nations has suffered a number of shortcomings. First, the underlying data base has typically been limited to Agnus Maddison's GNP and GNP per worker hour. This paper offers a new data base, purchasing-power-parity adjusted real...

We argue that the enumerators' occupational returns from the important census of 1880 were heavily edited prior to publication. The effect was to substantially reduce the number of individuals reported with an occupation. For youthful and older males and all women the editing was so substantial...

Historians often portray Native Americans as merely unfortunate victims of European disease and aggression, with lives in disarray that followed the arrival of Columbus and other explorers or conquerors. The data we analyze on human stature show, in contrast, that some Native Americans such as...

This paper brings together data from a variety of sources to create a portrait of net rates of return to capital in banking in the 1850s. The primary purpose is to provide estimates comparable to those developed by Lance Davis and many subsequent researchers for the post-bellum period. The...