Equity, Efficiency and Insurance: Explaining the Structure of Miners' Wage Payments in Victorian County Durham

John G Treble and Simon Vicary

Economic Journal, 1993, vol. 103, issue 417, 481-93

Abstract: The rules governing payment of hewers' wages in late nineteenth century Durham coal mines were complex. The authors' goal in this paper is to provide an economic rationale for them. Five key features are identified: payment by piece rate, payment to pairs rather than to individuals, indexation of the wage rate to coal price, an imperfect earnings equalization system, and randomized work assignment (caviling.) The authors construct a model of these institutions, explaining them as optimal responses to an environment in which output prices and seam quality are uncertain an d in which the monitoring of worker effort is costly. Copyright 1993 by Royal Economic Society.

Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0133%2819930 ... 0.CO%3B2-U&origin=bc full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecj:econjl:v:103:y:1993:i:417:p:481-93

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... al.asp?ref=0013-0133

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Journal is currently edited by Martin Cripps, Steve Machin, Woulter den Haan, Andrea Galeotti, Rachel Griffith and Frederic Vermeulen

More articles in Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing () and Christopher F. Baum ().