This paper examines shifts over time in the relative demand for skilled labor in the United States. Although de-skilling in the conventional sense did occur overall in nineteenth century manufacturing, a more nuanced picture is that occupations "hollowed out": the share of "middle-skill" jobs -...

In a famous paper, Kenneth Sokoloff argued that the labor input of entrepreneurs was generally not included in the count of workers in manufacturing establishments in the early censuses of manufacturing. According to Sokoloff, this biased downward econometric estimates of economies of scale if...

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms increased by more than a third—100 million acres—and almost 50 million acres, an area almost equal to that of the states of Indiana and Ohio combined, were converted from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of...

Written in celebration of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the <i>American Economic Review</i> (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...

Everyone knows that public school officials in the American South violated the Supreme Court's separate-but-equal decision. But did the violations matter? Yes, enforcement of separate-but-equal would have narrowed racial differences in school attendance in the early twentieth century South. But...

Between 1950 and 1970 the labor force participation rate of southern black males aged 16-19 declined by 27 percentage points. This decline has been attributed to two demand-side shocks: the mechanization of cotton agriculture in the 1950s and extensions in the coverage of the federal minimum...

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...

The pace and pattern of wealth accumulation by Southern blacks in the period before World War I is of central importance to the historical evolution of black/white income differences. This paper extends recent work by Robert Higgs, who used data on assessed wealth for Georgia to study the...

In an economy with 'national' factor markets, the factor price effects of a permanent, regional specific shock register everywhere, perhaps with a brief lag. The United States in the nineteenth century does not appear to have been such an economy. Using data for a variety of occupations, I...