Two opposing views of the antebellum economy are tested. One is that aggregate economic activity was severely diminished and that unemployment was substantial and prolonged during several downturns. The alternative interpretation is that antebellum fluctuations were more apparent than real;...

The structure of wages narrowed considerably during the 1940's, increased slightly during the 1950's and 1960's, and then expanded greatly after 1970. The era of wage stretching of the past two decades has been a current focus, but we return attention here to the decade that was witness to an...

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,...

The purpose of this paper is to survey recent research on wages and prices in the united States before the civil War. The basic conclusion is that, while much progress has been made in documenting regional, temporal and occupational differentials, further insights will require a large amount of...

The California Gold Rush was an unexpected shock of tremendous size that prompted the costly re-allocation of labor to a frontier region. Using newly-collected archival data, this paper presents estimates of nominal and real wages in Gold Rush California. Consistent with a simple dynamic model...

Between 1940 and 1950 wage differentials within and between labor market groups narrowed significantly - the so-called 'Great Compression'. This paper disaggregates the Great Compression into its public and private components. Wage compression in the public sector, along with a decline in the...

This paper uses newly collected archival evidence to examine various aspects of the geographic performance of American labor markets before the Civil War. Much of the paper addresses the evolution of regional differences in real wages, of interest to economic historians because they speak to the...

Written in celebration of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review (February 2011), this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its...

This paper uses newly collected archival evidence to examine various aspects of the geographic performance of American labor markets before the Civil War. Much of the paper addresses the evolution of regional differences in real wages, of interest to economic historians because they speak to the...

In the United States today the academic field of economic history is much closer to economics than it is to history in terms of professional behavior, a stylized fact that I call the “integration of economic history into economics”. I document this using two types of evidence – use of...