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

该项目将收集、计算机化并提供1870年至1900年美国工资的新数据。数据将来自两个来源：1870年社会统计普查手稿，其中收集了小民事部门各级各种职业的工资信息；以及《雇用人员和物品报告》，这是美国陆军文职雇员工资单的集合。这些数据将用于探讨19世纪劳动力市场一体化的两个问题。第一个是工资趋同的过程，即随着时间的推移，高工资或低工资的当地劳动力市场保持高工资或低工资的趋势。第二个是工资在边境州定居中的作用：是高工资通过“吸引”新移民到边境而导致定居，还是劳动力被“推”到新的地方（西部充当人口“安全阀”），导致这些地区的定居和工资下降。这些数据还将用于构建新的年度工资序列，该序列将比以前的数据具有更好的职业和地理覆盖范围。

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.