The racial gap in the value of owner occupied housing has narrowed substantially since 1940, but this narrowing has not been even over time or across space. The 1970s stand out as an unusual decade in which the value gap did not narrow despite continued convergence in the observed...

We use data from the manuscript censuses of manufacturing for 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 to study the dispersion of average monthly wages across establishments. We find a marked increased in wage inequality over the period, an increase that cannot be explained by biases in the data or changes in...

This paper surveys recent research on the labor force in the nineteenth century. I examine trends in the aggregate size, demographic, occupational and industrial composition of the labor force; short-run and long-run movements in nominal and real wages; hours of work; the development of the...

Around the turn of the century, Southern blacks lost the right to vote and discrimination against them by local government officials intensified. This paper argues that, in the case of the de jure segregated public schools attended by black children, the ability of Southern blacks to ''vote with...

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation...

The spatial mismatch hypothesis posits that employment decentralization isolated urban blacks from work opportunities. This paper focuses on one large employer that has remained in the central city over the twentieth century - the U.S. Postal Service. We find that blacks substitute towards...

Educational achievement in segregated school systems was considerably lower in the black schools than in the white schools. Economic historians have argued that the racial achievement gap reflected the discriminatory funding of the black schools. This paper assesses counterfactually the...

In 1900, 90 percent of America?s black population lived in the South and only 4.3 percent of those born in the region era living elsewhere. By 1950 the proportion of blacks living in the South had declined to 68 percent and 19.6 percent of those born in the region had left it. Using samples...

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...

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...