New Evidence on Wages in the United States, 1870-1900

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This project will collect, computerize, and make available new data on wages in the United States from 1870 to 1900. The data will be drawn from two sources: the 1870 manuscript census of social statistics which collected information on wages in various occupations at the minor civil division level; and the Reports of Persons and Articles Hired, which are a collection of payrolls of civilian employees of the United States Army. The data will be used to explore two issues of labor market integration in the nineteenth century. The first is the process of wage convergence, the tendency for high or low-wage local labor markets to remain high or low wage over time. The second is the role of wages in the settlement of frontier states: did high wages cause settlement by "pulling" new settlers to the frontier, or was labor "pushed" into new locations (with the West acting as a population "safety-valve"), causing both settlement and depressed wages in these areas. The data will also be used to construct new annual wage series that will have better occupational and geographic coverage than those previously available.