First Cabin Fares from New York to the British Isles, 1826-1914

Brandon Dupont (), Drew Keeling and Thomas Weiss

No 22426, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We present a continuous time series on first cabin passenger fares for ocean travel from New York to the British Isles covering nearly a century of time. We discuss the conceptual and empirical difficulties of constructing such a time series, and examine the reasons for differences between the behavior of advertised fares and those based on passenger revenues. We find that while there are conceptual differences between these two measurements, as well as differences in the average values, the two generally moved in parallel, which means that the advertised fare series can serve as a reasonable proxy for movement of the revenue-based fares. We also find that advertised fares declined over time, roughly paralleling the drop in freight rates for U.S. bulk exports, until around 1890, but thereafter increased while freight rates continued to decline. We propose several hypotheses for this divergent behavior and suggest lines of future research.

JEL-codes: N10 N11 N7 N71 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-tre
Note: DAE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Research in Economic History, eds. Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott, 2017 vol. 33, 19-63

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22426.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: First Cabin Fares from New York to the British Isles, 1826–1914 (2017)
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:nbr:nberwo:22426

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22426

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().