Rising Wage Dispersion Across American Manufacturing Establishments, 1850-1880

Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman and Robert Andrew Margo
Additional contact information
Fred Bateman: Terry College of Business, University of Georgia

No 36, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University

Abstract: We use data from the manuscript censuses of manufacturing for 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 to study the dispersion of average monthly wages across establishments. We find a marked increased in wage inequality over the period, an increase that cannot be explained by biases in the data or changes in census enumeration procedures. Based on log wage regressions on establishment characteristics (for example, size, capital intensity, use of steam power, and so on) we compute a decomposition of the change in wage inequality between 1850 and 1880. The decomposition reveals that changes in "wage structure" - the regression coefficients and the standard error of the residuals - largely offset each: changes in the coefficients produced a reduction in wage inequality, while residual inequality increased. Most of the rise in wage inequality can be attributed to an increased concentration of employment in large establishments, which paid relatively low wages. We present indirect evidence that the negative effect of size on wages reflected differences in skill composition: workforces in large establishments were less skilled than in small establishments.

JEL-codes: N31 N61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-09
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu00-w36.pdf First version, 2000 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Rising Wage Dispersion Across American Manufacturing Establishments, 1850-1880 (2000)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:van:wpaper:0036

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diana Weymark ().