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Abstract:
Current concern with relationships among particular technologies, capital and the wage structure motivates this study of the origins of technology-skill complementarity in manufacturing. We offer evidence of the existence of technology-skill and capital-skill (relative) complementarities from 1909 to 1929 and suggest that they were associated with continuous-process and batch methods and the adoption of electric motors. Industries that used more capital per worker and a greater proportion of their horsepower in the form of purchased electricity employed relatively more educated blue-collar workers in 1940 and paid their blue-collar workers substantially more from 1909 to 1929. We also infer capital-skill complementarity using the wage-bill for non-production workers and find that the relationship was as large from 1909-19 as it has been recently. Finally, we link our findings to those on the high- school movement (1910 to 1940). The rapid increase in the supply of skills from 1910 to 1940 may have prevented rising inequality with technological change.

Abstract:
This essay is the companion piece to about 550 individual data series on education to be included in the updated "Historical Statistics of the United States," Millennial Edition (Cambridge University Press 2000). The essay reviews the broad outlines of U.S. educational history from the nineteenth century to the present, including changes in enrollments, attendance, schools, teachers, and educational finance at the three main schooling levels -- elementary, secondary, and higher education. Data sources are discussed at length, as are issues of comparability across time and data reliability. Some of the data series are provided, as is a brief chronology of important U.S. educational legislation, judicial decisions, and historical time periods.

Abstract:
U.S. educational and occupational wage differentials were exceptionally high at the dawn of the twentieth century and then decreased in several stages over the next eight decades. But starting in the early 1980s the labor market premium to skill rose sharply and by 2005 the college wage premium was back at its 1915 level. The twentieth century contains two inequality tales: one declining and one rising. We use a supply-demand-institutions framework to understand the factors that produced these changes from 1890 to 2005. We find that strong secular growth in the relative demand for more educated workers combined with fluctuations in the growth of relative skill supplies go far to explain the long-run evolution of U.S. educational wage differentials. An increase in the rate of growth of the relative supply of skills associated with the high school movement starting around 1910 played a key role in narrowing educational wage differentials from 1915 to 1980. The slowdown in the growth of the relative supply of college workers starting around 1980 was a major reason for the surge in the college wage premium from 1980 to 2005. Institutional factors were important at various junctures, especially during the 1940s and the late 1970s.

Abstract:
The United States today, according to most studies, is among the least corrupt nations in the world. But America's past was checkered with political scandal and widespread corruption that would not seem unusual compared with the most corrupt developing nation today. We construct a "corruption and fraud index" using word counts from a large number of newspapers for 1815 to 1975, supplemented with other historical facts. The index reveals that America experienced a substantial decrease in corruption from 1870 to 1920, particularly from the late-1870s to the mid-1880s and again in the 1910s. At its peak in the 1870s the "corruption and fraud index" is about five times its level from the end of the Progressive Era to the 1970s. If the United States was once considerably more corrupt than it is today, then America's history should offer lessons about how to reduce corruption. How did America become a less corrupt polity, economy, and society? We review the findings and insights from a series of essays for a conference volume, Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's History, for which this paper is the introduction that attempt to understand the remarkable evolution of corruption and reform in U.S. history.

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Abstract:
The labor force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop. Its þ-shape is revealed both across the process of economic development and through the histories of currently advanced countries. The initial decline in the participation rate is due to the movement of production from the household, family farm, and small business to the wider market, and to a strong income effect. But the income effect weakens and the substitution effect strengthens at some point. This paper explores why the change takes place and why the þ-shape is traced out. When women are poorly educated their only wage labor outside the home and family is in manual work, against which a strong social stigma exists. But when women are educated, particularly at the secondary level, they enter white-collar work, against which no social stigma exists. Data for more than one-hundred countries and for United States history are used to explore the hypothesis of the þ-shaped female labor force function.

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Abstract:
Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor%u2019s degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the narrowing of the gender gap in college and its reversal. From 1972 to 1992 high school girls narrowed the gap with boys in math and science course taking and in achievement test scores. These variables, which we term the proximate determinants, can account for 30 to 60 percent of the relative increase in women%u2019s college completion rate. Behind these changes were several others: the future work expectations of young women increased greatly between 1968 and 1979 and the age at first marriage for college graduate women rose by 2.5 years in the 1970s, allowing them to be more serious students. The reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, was due in part to the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females.

Abstract:
The fraction of U.S. college graduate women entering professional programs increased substantially just after 1970, and the age at first marriage among all U.S. college graduate women began to soar around the same year. We explore the relationship between these two changes and the diffusion of the birth control pill ('the pill') among young, unmarried college graduate women. Although the pill was approved in 1960 by the Food and Drug Administration and spread rapidly among married women, it did not diffuse among young, single women until the late 1960s after state law changes reduced the age of majority and extended 'mature minor' decisions. We present both descriptive time series and formal econometric evidence that exploit cross-state and cross-cohort variation in pill availability to young, unmarried women, establishing the 'power of the pill' in lowering the costs of long-duration professional education for women and raising the age at first marriage.

Abstract:
The fraction of U.S. college graduate women entering professional programs increased substantially around 1970 and the age at first marriage among all U.S. college graduate women soared just after 1972. We explore the relationship between these two changes and how each was shaped by the diffusion of the birth control pill among young, single college educated women. Although the pill' was approved in 1960 by the FDA and diffused rapidly among married women, it did not diffuse among young single women until the late 1960s when a series of state law changes reduced the age of majority and extended mature minor decisions. We model the impact of the pill on women's careers as consisting of two effects. The pill had a direct positive effect on women's career investment by almost eliminating the chance of becoming pregnant and thus the cost of having sex. The pill also created a social multiplier effect by encouraging the delay of marriage generally and thus increasing a career woman's likelihood of finding an appropriate mate after professional school. We present a collage of evidence pointing to the power of the pill in lowering the costs of long-duration professional education for women. The evidence consists of the striking coincidences in the timing of changes in career investment, marriage age, state laws, and pill use among young single women. The connection between changes in the age at first marriage and the pill is further explored using state variation in laws affecting young single women's pill access. We also evaluate alternative explanations for the changes in career and marriage.

Abstract:
The career and family outcomes of college graduate women suggest that the twentieth century contained five distinct cohorts.' Each cohort made choices concerning career and family subject to different constraints. The first cohort, graduating college from the beginning of the twentieth century to the close of World War I, had either family or career.' The second, graduating college from around 1920 to the end of World War II, had job then family.' The third cohort the college graduate mothers of the baby boom' graduated college from around 1946 to the mid-1960s and had family then job.' The fourth cohort graduated college from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Using the NLS Young Women I demonstrate that 13 to 18 percent achieved career then family' by age 40. The objective of the fifth cohort, graduating from around 1980 to 1990, has been career and family,' and 21 to 28 percent (using the NLS Youth) have realized that goal by age 40. I trace the demographic and labor force experiences of these five cohorts of college graduates and discuss why career and family' outcomes changed over time.

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Abstract:
Recent college graduate women express frustration regarding the obstacles they will face in combining career and family. Tracing the demographic and labor force experiences of four cohorts of college women across the past century allows us to observe the choices each made and how the constraints facing college women loosened over time. No cohort of college graduate women in the past had a high success rate in combining family and career. Cohort I (graduating c. 1910) had a 50% rate of childlessness. Whereas cohort III (graduating c. 1955) had a high rate of childbearing, it had initially low labor force participation. Cohort IV (graduating c. 1972) provides the most immediate guide for today's college women and is close to the end of its fertility history. It is also a cohort that can be studied using the N.L.S. Young Women. In 1991, when the group was 37 to 47 years old, 28% of the sample's college graduate (white) women had yet to have a first birth. The estimates for career vary from 24% to 33% for all college graduate women in the sample. Thus only 13% to 17% of the group achieved 'family and career' by the time it was about 40 years old. Among those who attained career, 50% were childless. Cohort IV contains a small group of women who have combined family with career, but for most the goal remains elusive.

Abstract:
The modern economic role of women emerged in four phases. The first three were evolutionary; the last was revolutionary. Phase I occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s; Phase II was from 1930 to 1950; Phase III extended from 1950 to the late 1970s; and Phase IV, the "quiet revolution," began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing. Three aspects of women's choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases: horizon, identity, and decision-making. The evolutionary phases are apparent in time-series data on labor force participation. The revolutionary phase is discernible using time-series evidence on women's more predictable attachment to the workplace, greater identity with career, and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses. Each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change. These changes, moreover, coincide by birth cohort or period. The relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women's changing economic role is explored. The paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed. Women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not "opt-out,"but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate.

Abstract:
Meaningful discussions about 'women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a number of social and economic indicators. Sharp breaks are apparent in data on labor market expectations, college graduation rates, professional degrees, labor force participation rates, and the age at first marriage. Turning points are also evident in most of the series for college majors and occupations. Inflection or break points in almost all of these series occur from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and for cohorts born during the 1940s. Whatever the precise reasons for change, a great divide in college-graduate women's lives and employment occurred about 35 years ago. Previously, women who reached the peaks often made solo climbs and symbolized that women, contrary to conventional wisdom, could achieve greatness. But real change demanded a march by the masses from the 'valley to the summit'. That march began with cohorts born in the late 1940s.

Abstract:
A free and informative press is widely agreed to be crucial to the democratic process today. But throughout much of the nineteenth century U.S. newspapers were often public relations tools funded by politicians, and newspaper independence was a rarity. The newspaper industry underwent fundamental changes between 1870 and 1920 as the press became more informative and less partisan. Whereas 11 percent of urban dailies were "independent" in 1870, 62 percent were in 1920. The rise of the informative press was the result of increased scale and competitiveness in the newspaper industry caused by technological progress in the newsprint and newspaper industries. We examine the press coverage surrounding two major political scandals -- Credit Mobilier in the early 1870s and Teapot Dome in the 1920s. The analysis demonstrates a sharp reduction in bias and charged language in the half century after 1870.From 1870 to 1920, when corruption appears to have declined significantly within the United States, the press became more informative, less partisan, and expanded its circulation considerably. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that the rise of the informative press was one of the reasons why the corruption of the Gilded Age was sharply reduced during the subsequent Progressive Era.

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Abstract:
Anti-immigrant forces almost succeeded in passing restrictive legislation in 1897, but their plan did not ultimately materialize for another twenty years. During that time 17 million Europeans from among the poorest nations came to the United States. This paper explores the economic and political forces that propped the door open for those twenty years, as well as the factors that eventually shut it. Economic downturns and their consequent unemployment almost always brought demands for restriction. The flood of immigrants eventually did result in large negative effects on the wages of native-born workers. But the political clout of immigrants was strengthened by the reinforcing nature of their flows. Cities having large numbers of the foreign born received a disproportionate share of immigrants during the 1900 to 1910 period. After 1910, however, immigrant flows were diluting. This factor and the negative impact on immigrants on native wages were important in the passage of restrictionist legislation, although the rural heartland of America was pro-restriction from the 1890s.

Abstract:
The American university was shaped in a formative period from 1890 to 1940 long before the rise of federal funding, the G.I. Bill, and mass higher education. Both the scale and scope of institutions of higher education were greatly increased, the research university blossomed, states vastly increased their funding of higher education, and the public sector greatly expanded relative to the private sector. Independent professional institutions declined, as did theological institutes and denominational colleges in general. Increases in the scale and scope of institutions of higher education were generated by exogenous changes in the that affected the professions generally and that of the clergy in particular. The increase in the share of students in the public sector may also have been prompted by these exogenous changes for they gave advantages to institutions, such as those in the public sector, that had research facilities, reputation, and a long purse. The high school movement, which swept parts of the country from 1910 to 1940, brought students from less privileged backgrounds to college and thus also buoyed enrollments in the public sector. States differed widely in their funding of higher education per capita and we find that greater generosity in 1929 was positively associated with later statehood, lower private college enrollments in 1900, greater shares of employment in mining and manufacturing, higher income, and a proxy for greater and more equally distributed wealth.

Abstract:
The U.S. wage structure evolved across the last century: narrowing from 1910 to 1950, fairly stable in the 1950s and 1960s, widening rapidly during the 1980s, and â¬Spolarizingâ¬? since the late 1980s. We document the spectacular rise of U.S. wage inequality after 1980 and place recent changes into a century-long historical perspective to understand the sources of change. The majority of the increase in wage inequality since 1980 can be accounted for by rising educational wage differentials, just as a substantial part of the decrease in wage inequality in the earlier era can be accounted for by decreasing educational wage differentials.

Although skill-biased technological change has generated rapid growth in the relative demand for more-educated workers for at least the past century, increases in the supply of skills, from rising educational attainment of the U.S. work force, more than kept pace for most of the twentieth century. Since 1980, however, a sharp decline in skill supply growth driven by a slowdown in the rise of educational attainment of successive U.S. born cohorts has been a major factor in the surge in educational wage differentials. Polarization set in during the late 1980s with employment shifts into high- and low-wage jobs at the expense of the middle leading to rapidly rising upper tail wage inequality but modestly falling lower tail wage inequality.

Abstract:
This paper assesses the relative importance of various explanations for the gender gap in career outcomes for highly-educated workers in the U.S. corporate and financial sectors. The careers of MBAs, who graduated between 1990 and 2006 from a top U.S. business school, are studied to understand how career dynamics differ by gender. Although male and female MBAs have nearly identical (labor) incomes at the outset of their careers, their earnings soon diverge, with the male annual earnings advantage reaching almost 60 log points at ten to 16 years after MBA completion. We identify three proximate reasons for the large and rising gender gap in earnings: differences in training prior to MBA graduation; differences in career interruptions; and differences in weekly hours. These three determinants can explain the bulk of gender differences in earnings across the years following MBA completion. The presence of children is the main contributor to the lesser job experience, greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs. Some MBA mothers, especially those with well-off spouses, slow down in the labor market within a few years following their first birth. Disparities in the productive characteristics of male and female MBAs are small, but the pecuniary penalties from shorter hours and any job discontinuity are enormous for MBAs.

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Abstract:
Economic inequality is higher today than it has been since 1939, as measured by both the wage structure and wealth inequality. But the comparison between 1939 and 1999 is largely made out of necessity; the 1940 U.S. population census was the first to inquire of wage and salary income and education. We address what the returns to skill were prior to 1940 and piece together the first century-long history of skill premiums, the dispersion of the wage structure, and returns to formal schooling. We use the 1915 Iowa State Census, a remarkable and unique document, as well as several less-obscure but untapped reports. Using all of these sources, we find that the wage structure narrowed at several moments in the first half of the 20th century, not just in the 1940s, both coinciding with major economic disruptions brought about by war. The returns to education were in fact higher in 1914 than in 1939, and the enormous expansion in secondary schooling beginning in the 1910s was a contributing factor to the decrease in educational returns. Inequality and the returns to education across the entire century, therefore, first declined before their more recent and steep ascent.

Abstract:
The modern concept of the wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century. Capital embodied in people human capital mattered. The United States led all nations in mass post-elementary education during the human-capital century. The American system of education was shaped by New World endowments and Republican ideology and was characterized by virtues including publicly funded mass education that was open and forgiving, academic yet practical, secular, gender neutral, and funded and controlled by small districts. The American educational template was a remarkable success, but recent educational concerns and policy have redefined some of its "virtues" as "vices."

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

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No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
Human capital accumulation and technological change were to the twentieth century what physical capital accumulation was to the nineteenth century -- the engine of growth. The accumulation of human capital accounts for almost 60% of all capital formation and 28% of the per capita growth residual from 1929 to 1982. Advances in secondary schooling account for about 70% of the increase in total educational attainment from 1930 to 1970 for men 40 to 44 years old. High school, not college, was responsible for the enormous increase in the human capital stock during much of this century. In this paper I answer when and where high schools advanced in the 1910 to 1960 period. The most rapid expansion in the non-South regions occurred in the brief period from 1920 to 1935. The 1920s provided the initial burst in high school attendance, but the Great Depression added significantly to high school enrollment and graduation rates. Attendance rates were highest in states, regions, and cities with the least reliance on manufacturing and in areas where agricultural income per worker was high. Schooling was particularly low where certain industries that hired youths were dominant and where the foreign born had entered in large numbers before the immigration restriction of the 1920s. More education enabled states to converge to a higher level of per capita income between 1929 and 1947, and states rich in agricultural resources, yet poor in manufacturing, exported educated workers in later decades.

Abstract:
In the three decades from 1910 to 1940, the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools increased from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating soared from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more stringent and potentially constrained secondary-school aged youths. It might appear from the timing and the specifics of this history that the laws caused the increase in education rates. We evaluate the possibility that state compulsory schooling and child labor laws caused the increase in education rates by using contemporaneous evidence on enrollments. We also use micro-data from the 1960 census to examine the effect of the laws on overall educational attainment. Our estimation approach exploits cross-state differences in the timing of changes in state laws. We find that the expansion of state compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 1939 can, at best, account for 5 percent of the increase in high school enrollments and can account for about the same portion of the increase in the eventual educational attainment for the affected cohorts over the period.

Abstract:
In October 1993, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to Robert William Fogel and Douglass Cecil North `for having renewed research in economic history.' The Academy noted that `they were pioneers in the branch of economic history that has been called the ?new economic history,? or ?cliometrics?.' In this paper I address what this cliometrics is and how these two Nobel Prize winners furthered the discipline of economics.

Abstract:
Occupations are segregated by sex today, but were far more segregated in the early to mid-twentieth century when married women began to enter the labor force in large numbers. It is difficult to rationalize sex segregation and 'wage discrimination' on the basis of men's taste for distance from women in the same way differences between other groups in work and housing have been explained. Rather, this paper constructs a 'pollution' theory model of discrimination in which new female hires may reduce the prestige of a previously all-male occupation. The predictions of the model concern the range of segregated and integrated occupations with respect to a productivity characteristic and how occupational segregation changes as the characteristic distributions become more similar by sex. The historical record reveals numerous cases of the model's predictions. Occupations that were more segregated by sex, for both men and women, contained individuals with higher levels of the productivity characteristic. 'Credentialization,' the shattering of old stereotypes, and information about individual women's productivities can help expunge 'pollution.'

Abstract:
In the past two decades gender pay differences have narrowed considerably and a declining significance of gender has pervaded the labor market in numerous ways. This paper contends that in the first several decades of the twentieth century there was a rising significance of gender. The emergence of gender distinctions accompanied several important changes in the economy including the rise of white-collar work for women and increases in women's educational attainment. Firms adopted policies not to hire women in particular occupations and to exclude men from other occupations. A model of discrimination is developed in which men oppose the hiring of women into certain positions. The assumptions of the model break down when women acquire known and verifiable credentials. The shift from the rising to the declining significance of gender may have involved such a change.

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Abstract:
The study of the labor market across the past hundred years reveals enormous progress and also that history repeats itself and has come full circle in some ways. Progress has been made in the rewards of labor -- wages, benefits, and increased leisure through shorter hours, vacation time, sick leave, and earlier retirement. Labor has been granted added security on the job and more safety nets when unemployed, ill, and old. Progress in the labor market has interacted with societal changes. Women's increased participation in the paid labor force is the most significant. The virtual elimination of child and full-time juvenile labor is another. Two of the most pressing economic issues of our day demonstrate that history repeats itself. Labor productivity has been lagging since the 1970s. It was equally sluggish at other junctures in American history, but the present has unique features. The current slowdown in the United States has been accompanied by a widening in the wage structure. Rising inequality is a far more serious problem because of the coincidence. The wage structure was as wide in 1940 as today but there is, to date, no hard evidence when it began its upward trend. The wage structure has, therefore, come full circle to what it was more than a half century ago. Union strength has also come full circle to that at the turn of this century.

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No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
The 1940's were a turning point in married women's labor force participation, leading many to credit World War II with spurring economic and social change. This paper uses information from two retrospective surveys, one in 1944 and another in 1951, to resolve the role of World War II in the rise of women's paid work.

More than 50% of all married women working in 1950 had been employed in 1940, and more than half of the decade's new entrants joined the labor force after the war. Of those women who entered the labor force during the war, almost half exited before 1950. Employment during World War II did not enhance a woman's earnings in 1950 in a manner consistent with most hypotheses about the war. Considerable persistence in the labor force and in occupations during the turbulent 1940's is displayed for women working in 1950, similar to findings for the periods both before and after. World War II had several significant indirect impacts on women's employment, but its direct influence appears considerably more modest.

Abstract:
The second transformation' of U.S. education the growth of secondary schooling occurred swiftly in the early 1900s and placed the educational attainment of Americans far ahead of that in other nations for much of the twentieth century. Just 9 percent of U.S. youths had high school diplomas in 1910, but more than 50 percent did by 1940. By the mid-1950s the United States was 35 years in front of the United Kingdom in the educational attainment of 14 to 17-year olds. What can explain why secondary schooling advanced in the United States, why differences in secondary schooling emerged across U.S. states and cities, and why America led the world in educational attainment for much of the twentieth century? Although we motivate the paper with international comparisons, the core of the analysis exploits the considerable cross-state, cross-city, and time-series variation within the United States. The areas of the United States that led in secondary school education (the Far West, Great Plains, and parts of New England) were rich in income and wealth, had high proportions of the elderly, and had relative equality of wealth or income. Given wealth, they also contained a low proportion of jobs in manufacturing and low percentages immigrant and Catholic. Homogeneity of economic and social conditions, and the social stability of community, given a modicum of income or wealth, also fostered the extension of education to the secondary school level.

Abstract:
By the mid-nineteenth century school enrollment rates in the United States exceeded those of any other nation in the world and by the early twentieth century the United States had accomplished mass education at all levels. No country was able to close the gap until the last quarter of the twentieth century. For much of its history U.S. education was spurred by a set of 'virtues', the most important of which were public provision by small fiscally independent districts, public funding, secular control, gender neutrality, open access, a forgiving system, and an academic curriculum. The outcomes of the virtues were an enormous diffusion of educational institutions and the early spread of mass education. America borrowed its educational institutions from Europe but added to them in ways that served to enhance competition and openness. The virtues of long ago need not be the virtues of today, and they also need not have been virtuous in all places and at all times in the past. In this essay we explore the historical origins of these virtues and find that almost all were in place in the period before the American Civil War.

Abstract:
Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change in the way symphony orchestras recruit musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased hiring. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of blind' auditions with a screen' to conceal the identity of the candidate from the jury. Female musicians in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are 25% today. We ask whether women were more likely to be advanced and/or hired with the use of blind' auditions. Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra personnel, the switch to blind' auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras since 1970.

Abstract:
Ever since Lucy Stone decided to retain her surname at marriage in 1855, women in America have tried to do the same. But their numbers were extremely low until the 1970s. The increased age at first marriage, rising numbers with professional degrees and Ph.D.'s, the diffusion of "the Pill," state legal decisions, and the acceptance of the appellation "Ms.," among other factors, spurred surname retention among married women in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This paper tracks the fraction of college graduate women who kept their surnames upon marriage and after childbirth and explores some of the correlates of surname retention. We use two decades of data from The New York Times and twenty years of information on the Harvard class of 1980. A time series on surname retention at marriage for college graduate women, gleaned from wedding announcements in The New York Times, shows a large increase from 1980 to 1984, a leveling off to 1998, and a possible subsequent increase. About 35 percent kept their surname at marriage in 2001, but fewer than 10 percent did in 1980. Among the women in the Harvard class of 1980, about 52 percent kept their surname at some time after marriage and only a small fraction of this group changed their surname after having children. The observable characteristics of importance in surname retention are those revealing that the bride had already "made a name" for herself.

Abstract:
Unemployment compensation in the United States was signed into law in August 1935 as part of the omnibus Social Security Act. Drafted in a period of uncertainty and economic distress, the portions that dealt with unemployment insurance were crafted to achieve a multiplicity of goals, among them passage of the act and a guarantee of its constitutionality. Along with the federal-state structure went experience-rating and characteristics added by the states, such as the limitation on duration of benefits. The U.S. unemployment compensation system is distinctive among countries by virtue of its federal-state structure, experience-rating, and limitation on benefits. We contend that these features were products of the times, reflecting expediency more than efficiency, and thus that UI would have been different had it been passed in another decade. But how different is the UI system in the United States because of these features, and how have they affected the U.S. labor market? We present evidence showing that more seasonality in manufacturing employment in 1909-29 is related to higher UI benefits from 1947 to 1969, if a state's manufacturing employment share is below the national mean. Lobbying activities of seasonal industries appear important in the evolution of the parameters. We also present suggestive evidence on the relationship between declining seasonality and experience-rating.

Abstract:
The five-fold increase in the labor force participation rate of married women over the last half century was not accompanied by a substantial increase in the average job market experience of working women. Two data sets giving life-cycle labor force histories for cohorts of women born from the 1880s to 1910s indicate substantial (unconditional) heterogeneity in labor force participation. Married women in the labor force had a high degree of attachment to it; increased participation rates brought in women with little prior job experience and reduced cumulated years experience. According to extant schedules froma 1939 Women`s Bureau Bulletin, 86% of married women born around 1895 and working in 1939 had been employed 50% of the years since beginning work, and 47% had worked 88% of those years. Average years of experience for cross sections of working married women hardly increased from 1920 to 1950, rising from 9 to 10.5 years. Because wages are calculated only for currently employed individuals, the steadiness in relative wages of women to men over this period may result from stable experience ratings for employed married women. An exploration of the determinants of labor force persistence points to the importance of occupational choice early in the work history of a woman and to the rise in clerical and professional occupations in extending life-cycle labor force participation.

Abstract:
The United States led all other nations in the development of universal and publicly-funded secondary school education and much of the growth occurred from 1910 to 1940. The focus here is on the reasons for the high school movement' in American generally and why it occurred so early and swiftly in America's heartland - a region we dub the 'education belt.' At the center of this belt' was the state of Iowa and we use information from the unique 1915 Iowa State Census to explore the factors, at both the county and individual levels, that propelled states like Iowa to embrace secondary school education very early. Iowa's small towns, as well as those across the nation, were the loci of the high school movement. In an analysis at the national level, we find that greater homogeneity of income or wealth, a higher level of wealth, greater community stability, and more ethnic and religious homogeneity fostered high school expansion from 1910 to 1930. The pecuniary returns to secondary school education were high - on the order of 12 percent per year in 1914 - providing substantial private incentives for high school attendance. State-level measures of social capital today are strongly correlated with economic and schooling variables from 1900 to 1930. The social capital assembled locally in the early part of the century, which apparently fueled part of the high school movement, continues to contribute to human capital formation.

Abstract:
A new state-level series on secondary-school data demonstrates that graduation and enrollment rates increased greatly in the 1920s and 1930s in most regions. An 18-year old male in 1910 had just a 10% chance of having a high school diploma but by the mid-1930s the median 18-year old male was a high school graduate. This Appendix describes the procedures used to construct the state-level secondary school enrollment and graduation numbers contained in the NBER Working Paper `How America Graduated from High School: 1910 to 1960.'

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No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
Supervisory and monitoring costs are explored to understand aspects of occupational segregation by sex. Around the turn of this century 47 percent of all female manufacturing operatives were paid by the piece, but only 13 percent of the males were. There were very few males and females employed by the same firm in the same occupation, and when they were, they were invariably paid by the piece. The group of industries that hired two-thirds of all male operatives, hired virtually no females. Males, but not females, were employed in teams across a variety of industries, and there was segregation by sex across various jobs requiring similar training and ability. Occupations in the clerical sector were rapidly "feminized" from 1900 to 1920 and an organization of work was employed resembling that used earlier in manufacturing. These findings can be understood by considering a model of occupational segregation in which monitoringis costly and males and females have different turnover rates. Employers adopt one of two solutions to avoid shirking -- piece rates and deferred payment. Because females are only employed in one period, piece rates are used for them; males, however, might prefer deferred payment which causes their earnings profile to be steeper than otherwise. Occupational segregation by sex results even if workers are homogeneous with regard to ability and there are nocosts of job investment. Males can also receive higher average wages per period than females. Under a reasonable set of assumptions, females would want to be employed in the male sector,but would be barred from doing so. Establishment-level and more aggregated data for manufacturing around 1890 are examined with regard to the costs of supervising and monitoring male and female workers in time and piece-rate positions.The findings tend to support the assumptions of the model concerning the relative costs of monitoring workers of different sexes paid by different methods.

Abstract:
Has economic progress increased the relative earnings of females to males over the long run? Evidence on trends in the earnings gap for the last four decades appears to run counter to this hypothesis. Numerous data sources are used in this paper to piece together a 170-year history of the earnings of females relative to those of males and the variables that determine earnings in the market place. In brief, the constancy of the earnings gap from the 1950s is a short-run phenomenon and cannot be extrapolated into the more distant past. The ratio of female to male earnings in the economy as a whole rose from just over 0.45 to just under 0.60 during 1890 to 1930. It rose to ust over 0.60 by 1950 but has been virtually stable from then, declining somewhat during the early to mid-fifties and rising after 1981. The ratio in the manufacturing sector rose from about 0.35 in 1920, to 0.50 in 1850, and to 0.58 to 1930.

Advances in the labor market experience of the female working population account for 24 percent of the incrase in the earnings ratio over the 1890t o 1940 period. Increases in the returns to education and, to a lesser extent, in educational attainment, account for about 40 percent of the increase from 1890 to 1970. It is also possible that the decreased return to physical attributes (such as strength) accounts for another 28 percent of the increase in the female to male earnings ratio. The various factors considered account for about 85 percent of the entire increase in the ratio from 1890 to 1970 (some factors served to decrease the ratio). The constancy of the gender gap from the 1950s is a function of the increased labor force participation of women is a function of the increased labor force participation of women which served to stabilize the work experience of the working population of women and to make the future highly unpredictable for many cohorts.

Abstract:
Single women in the U.S. dominated the female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task oriented and payment was frequently by the piece. Earnings rose steeply with experience and peaked early; learning was mainly on-the-job. Sex segregation of employment is seen as a partial product of the method of payment, and the early termination of human capital investment was a function of the life-cycle labor force participation of these women, although the role of the family is also critical.

Abstract:
We present the first estimates of the returns to years of schooling before 1940 using a large sample of men and women, employed in a variety of sectors and occupations, from the Iowa State Census of 1915. We find that the returns to a year of high school, and to a year of college, were substantial in 1915 - about 11 percent for all males and in excess of 12 percent for young males. Some of the return to years of high school and college arose because more education allowed individuals to enter lucrative white-collar jobs. But we also find sizable educational wage differentials within the white- and blue-collar sectors. Returns to education above the 'common school' grades were substantial even within the agricultural sector. Given the high overall rate of return to secondary schooling, it is no wonder that the 'high school movement' took root in America around 1910, even in agricultural areas such as Iowa. Census data for 1940, 1950, and 1960 are used to show that returns to years of schooling were greater in 1915 than in 1940. We conclude that the return to education decreased sometime between 1915 and 1940 and then declined again during the 1940s.

Abstract:
The first half of the nineteenth century was a critical juncture regarding the emergence of female participation in the market economy, the increase in the wage of females relative to that of adult males, and the evolution of large scale firms in both mechanized and non-mechanized industries. We present the first systematic and comprehensive description of these events as they evolved in the states of the Northeast to 1850. Our sources are primarily samples taken from three early censuses and reports of manufacturing, 1820, 1832, and 1850. Our principal findings are: (1) that women and children composed a large share (over 40% in 1832) of the entire manufacturing labor force during the initial period of industrialization in the U.S., but that this share began a secular decline as early as 1840; (2) that the wage of females (and boys) relative to that of adult males rose wherever large scale manufacturing establishments spread and that by 1850 this ratio had risen to almost 90% its long-term level; (3) that the labor force participation of young unmarried women in the industrial counties of the Northeast was, in 1832, high by late nineteenth century standards; and (4) that the employment of females and boys was closely associated with production processes used by large-scale establishments. Women and children had been a previously under-utilized and large segment of the potential labor force, and their harnessing by manufacturing was a critical factor in the industrialization of the Northeast.

Abstract:
The causes and consequences of state maximum hours laws for female workers, passed from the mid-1800s to the 1920s, are explored and are found to differ from a recent reinterpretation. Although maximum hours legislation reduced scheduled hours in 1920, the impact was minimal and it operated equally for men. Legislation affecting only women was symptomatic of a general desire by labor for lower hours, and these lower hours were achieved in the tight, and otherwise special, World War I labor market -- hours of work declined substantially for most workers in the second decade of this century. Most importantly, the restrictiveness of the legislation had no effect on the employment share of women in manufacturing. The legislation was, on the contrary, associated with a positive impact on the employment share of women in sales (another covered sector). Finally, labor force participation rates of women across cities during the 1920s were strongly and negatively correlated with shorter hours of work per day, consistent with one time-series explanation for the increase in female market work. These results are consistent with a labor market model in which scheduled hours of work per day are negatively related to days worked per week, and that assumption is justified using previously untapped data on actual hours, scheduled hours, and days worked for women in the covered sectors.

Abstract:
Between 1890 and the late 1920s the premium to high school education declined substantially for both men and women. In 1890 ordinary office workers, whose positions generally required a high school diploma, earned almost twice what production workers did. But by the late 1920s they earned about one and one-half times as much. The premium earned by female office workers, male office workers, and male office workers plus supervisors fell by about 30%. Several factors operated in tandem to narrow differentials to education. The supply of high school graduates relative to those without high school degrees increased by 16% from 1890 to 1910, but by 40% from 1910 to 1920 and by 50% from 1920 to 1930. Immigration restriction is another factor, but is dwarfed by the expansion of high schools; reduced immigrant flows explain just 1/8th of the relative supply increase of educated workers. The impact of rapidly increasing supplies of high school educated workers was reinforced by technological changes in the office that enabled the substitution of educated workers and machines for the exceptionally able. The premium to high school graduation, rather than declining further in the 1930s, levelled off as the demand for high school educated workers expanded in the manufacturing sector. We make comparisons between this historical period of narrowing wage differentials in the face of technological progress in the office and ours of widening differentials.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
This paper presents an analysis of birth weights and infant mortality in mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia using obstetrics records of Philadelphia`s Almshouse hospital, an institution for the poor and their offspring. Children of the poor weighed between 2,900 and 3,200 grams on average at birth, or about the 10th to 25th percentile of modern birth weight standards. 3rthweights declined during the Civil War decade, consistent with the poor state of the economy in the l80s, because birth weights were lower than modern standards the urban poor suffered from higher rates of infant mortality than today. But infant mortality was far worse than that expected from a modern schedule of mortality by birth weight, and a major determinant of excess mortality appears to be the poor quality of nineteenth century obstetrics.

Abstract:
How did industrialization in the nineteenth century affect the
well-being of children among American working class families?
Two revealing surveys from 1890 and 1907 are used to examine
the implications of child labor on schooling decisions and on
possible offsetting intrafamily transfers, in the form of current
"retained" earnings or future asset transfers. Both issues are
analyzed within the context of a formal model of family labor
supply, in which returns to schooling accrue after the youth has
left the household and thus the interests of the parents and the
child need not coincide. Parents working in the industries
examined did not, it appears, compensate their children for the
reduced future earnings implied by child labor, in either the
current or in future time periods. But, in addition, the
migration of families in which parental altruism was weak may
have eliminated much of the apparent increase in family income
due to higher child earnings. We end with a note reconciling
our findings with the long term trend away from child labor.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
We explore the savings behavior and saving rates of ordinary Americans through their accounts at the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, the oldest mutual savings bank in the United States founded in 1816 to encourage thrift among the working poor. Our sample contains the 2,374 accounts opened in 1850, of which one-quarter were linked to the 1850 census manuscripts. Savings accounts were generally brief affairs; only 30 percent lasted more than 5 years. But median balances mounted to about three-quarters of annual income in about three to four years. Deposits and withdrawals were infrequent, but substantial. The median deposit was about 1 to 2 months of gross income whereas the median withdrawal represented about 2 to 3 months but occurred far less often. Account holders, then, did not generally use their accounts for the short-run fluctuations in income we suspect they experienced. Only female servants, as a group, used their accounts for life-cycle savings eventually amassing large nest eggs through steady but slow accumulation. Men often used their accounts to hold funds on route to acquiring physical property. Estimated savings rates range from a low of 12 percent to a more sensible one of 21 percent among only active accounts.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.