In recent decades the United States has experienced a pronounced widening of its wage structure. For the most part, analysis of the recent rise in wage inequality has taken place with the benefits of hindsight--that is, without placing recent changes in the wage structure in historical context....

Data from the manuscript census of manufacturing are used to estimate the effects of the length of the working day on output and wages. We find that the elasticity of output with respect to daily hours worked was positive but less than one--implying diminishing returns to increases in working...

Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan African–American households increased by 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white...

This chapter briefly surveys the principal issues in the economic history of international migration. As a way of framing this vast, unruly topic, I view the issues through the lens of the nation receiving the majority of immigrants historically – the United States prior to World War One....

During the 1940s, racial differences in wages narrowed at an unusually rapid pace. Using a decomposition technique different from that of previous studies, the author shows that wage compression between and within groups—the so-called “Great Compressionâ€â€”was a major...