Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Although 19th century American labor markets were unencumbered by regulatory legislation, labor market institutions played an active role determining labor market outcomes and the distribution of income. We provide evidence of firm-specific rents in 19th century labor markets: employees in firms experiencing positive output price shocks earned significant wage premia, relative to very similar workers. Employees and employers bargained over rents in the labor contract, with workers striking to raise wages. We present data on strikes' frequency in the 19th century, and suggestive correlations between strikes and wages. The U.S. government supported employers in limiting strikes' efficacy. Strike-breaking actions included intervention by police and militia; employers often relied on less drastic, but still effective, judicial labor injunctions suppressing strikes. We document the rise of these injunctions, pointing to the important role played by the judicial branch in structuring (Northern) American labor market institutions prior to the rise of legislative regulation.
Author: Joshua L. Rosenbloom Publisher: ISBN: Category : Labor market Languages : en Pages : 52
Book Description
Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I improvements in transportation and communication encouraged increasing interregional and international economic integration. This paper traces and analyzes the progress of increasing labor market integration in the United States during this period of `globalization.' It argues that although the falling cost and increasing speed of transportation and communication in this period initiated a substantial expansion of labor market boundaries, the pattern of increasing integration was strikingly uneven. By the end of the nineteenth century, labor markets in the northern United States were part of a tightly integrated regional labor market that was in turn closely linked with labor markets in northern Europe. But this regional and international integration coincided with the persistent failure of integration between northern and southern labor markets within the United States. The importance of this finding is two-fold. First, it suggests that the forces shaping the determination of wages, the evolution of wage structure, and the growth of unions cannot be understood at either a purely local, or a purely national level. Second, it shows that the process of market integration was complex, depending on the interaction between historically determined market institutions and falling transportation and communication costs.
Author: Rosanne Currarino Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252090101 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
In The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, "What should constitute full participation in American society? What standard of living should citizens expect and demand?" Currarino traces the diverse efforts to answer to these questions, from the fledgling trade union movement to contests over immigration, from economic theory to popular literature, from legal debates to social reform. The contradictory answers that emerged--one stressing economic participation in a consumer society, the other emphasizing property ownership and self-reliance--remain pressing today as contemporary scholars, journalists, and social critics grapple with the meaning of democracy in post-industrial America.
Author: David Brian Robertson Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780847697298 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Capital, Labor, and State is a systematic and thorough examination of American labor policy from the Civil War to the New Deal. David Brian Robertson skillfully demonstrates that although most industrializing nations began to limit employer freedom and regulate labor conditions in the 1900s, the United States continued to allow total employer discretion in decisions concerning hiring, firing, and workplace conditions. Robertson argues that the American constitution made it much more difficult for the American Federation of Labor, government, and business to cooperate for mutual gain as extensively as their counterparts abroad, so that even at the height of New Deal, American labor market policy remained a patchwork of limited protections, uneven laws, and poor enforcement, lacking basic national standards even for child labor.
Author: Edited by Louis P. Cain Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190937068 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 457
Book Description
American economic history describes the transition of a handful of struggling settlements on the Atlantic seaboard into the nation with the most successful economy in the world today. As the economy has developed, so have the methods used by economic historians to analyze the process. Interest in economic history has sharply increased in recent years among the public, policy-makers, and in the academy. The current economic turmoil, calling forth comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s, is in part responsible for the surge in interest among the public and in policy circles. It has also stimulated greater scholarly research into past financial crises, the multiplier effects of fiscal and monetary policy, the dynamics of the housing market, and international economic cooperation and conflict. Other pressing policy issues--including the impending retirement of the Baby-Boom generation, the ongoing expansion of the healthcare sector, and the environmental challenges imposed by global climate change--have further increased demand for the long-run perspective given by economic history. Confronting this need, The Oxford Handbook of American Economic History affords access to the latest research on the crucial events, themes, and legacies of America's economic history--from colonial America, to the Civil War,up to present day. More than fifty contributors address topics as wide-ranging as immigration, agriculture, and urbanization. Over its two volumes, this handbook gives readers not only a comprhensive look at where the field of American economic history currently stands but where it is headed in the years to come.
Author: Edited by Louis P. Cain Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197575994 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 472
Book Description
American economic history describes the transition of a handful of struggling settlements on the Atlantic seaboard into the nation with the most successful economy in the world today. As the economy has developed, so have the methods used by economic historians to analyze the process. Interest in economic history has sharply increased in recent years among the public, policy-makers, and in the academy. The current economic turmoil, calling forth comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s, is in part responsible for the surge in interest among the public and in policy circles. It has also stimulated greater scholarly research into past financial crises, the multiplier effects of fiscal and monetary policy, the dynamics of the housing market, and international economic cooperation and conflict. Other pressing policy issues--including the impending retirement of the Baby-Boom generation, the ongoing expansion of the healthcare sector, and the environmental challenges imposed by global climate change--have further increased demand for the long-run perspective given by economic history. Confronting this need, The Oxford Handbook of American Economic History affords access to the latest research on the crucial events, themes, and legacies of America's economic history--from colonial America, to the Civil War,up to present day. More than fifty contributors address topics as wide-ranging as immigration, agriculture, and urbanization. Over its two volumes, this handbook gives readers not only a comprhensive look at where the field of American economic history currently stands but where it is headed in the years to come.
Author: 
Author: Suresh Naidu
Author: Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Author: Rosanne Currarino
Author: Mark Twain
Author: 
Author: David Brian Robertson
Author: Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Author: Edited by Louis P. Cain
Author: Edited by Louis P. Cain