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Full-Text Articles in Income Distribution
Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss
Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we present new comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports in constant prices grew very quickly, but barely faster than population during the period under consideration. Furthermore, improvements in the terms of trade increased the colonists’ ability to buy …
Reexamining The Distribution Of Wealth In 1870, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Gregory W. Stutes
Reexamining The Distribution Of Wealth In 1870, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Gregory W. Stutes
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This paper uses data on real and personal property ownership collected in the 1870 Federal Census to explore factors influencing individual wealth accumulation and the aggregate distribution of wealth in the United States near the middle of the nineteenth century. Previous analyses of these data have relied on relatively small samples, or focused on population subgroups. By using the much larger sample available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) we are able to disaggregate the data much more finely than has previously been possible allowing us to explore differences in inequality across space and between different population groups. …
Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The substantial shifts in the sectoral and geographic location of economic activity that took place in the late nineteenth-century United States required the reallocation of large quantities of labor. This paper examines the response of labor market institutions to the challenges of unbalanced growth. Based on previously unexploited descriptive evidence from the reports of the Immigration Commission it argues that employer recruitment was crucial to the adjustment of labor markets to shifting patterns of supply and demand. Because individual employers could capture only a fraction of the benefits of recruitment, however, investment in this activity may have been less than …