Labor Markets in Economic History
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PST)
- Chair: Meredith Paker, Grinnell College
New Work in the Second Industrial Revolution
Abstract
This paper introduces a new measure of the emergence of new occupations in the late 19th and early 20th century United States. Rapid technological and procedural innovation dramatically altered the task content of production, leading to the emergence and diffusion of entirely new work activities and occupations. We use the original write-in occupation and industry responses recorded on Census enumeration forms between 1850 and 1940 to identify specific, granular, job titles such as “comptometer operator” at the worker level and track their growth over time. Using this data, we first document a set of novel facts about new jobs during the Second Industrial Revolution including the locations where they first appeared, how quickly they diffused across labor markets and industries, and the demographic characteristics of the workers who held them. Next, we match job titles observed in the Census to textual descriptions of their tasks and tools derived from the first edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. We then link these descriptions to a comprehensive corpus of U.S. patent texts to study the relationship between the adoption of new production methods, the skill content of new work, and local labor market power.Women's Work over the Long Run: A Task-Based Approach
Abstract
This paper compiles the universe of available task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and attaches task variables to women 's reported paid occupations in Census data for the United States from 1900 to 2020. All available Decennial Censuses and American Community Surveys are used. The nature of women 's work has not received as much attention as that of men, especially in a long run perspective. Women 's labor force participation rates, by characteristics such as age, race, and marital status, changed greatly over this time period, as did the demand for skill, due mainly to technological change and structural change. The paper first documents equilibrium observed tasks of female workers and examines how tasks changed by cohort as the long twentieth century unfolded. It then moves on to explore the mechanisms of why female work changed so much over this time, considering as key potential factors internal migration flows; technological changes biased towards certain skills; biased structural change; policy and institutional changes. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list, and the plan is to use differential timing of these changes across states and counties to explore how and why women 's work changed. The paper will leverage longitudinal data on women, wherever possible, to uncover these mechanisms. The literature has recently made progress on linking women in historical datasets and we will use this to create new information about the task profiles of female workers who stayed and exited the labor market at various life stages over the long run.Women’s Wages, Gender Wage Gap and the Long Run of History. France in the Modern Period
Abstract
While there is a considerable burgeoning literature on the evolution of wages in the very long run in countries – such as England or Sweden – there is currently no macroeconomic appraisal of women 's wages for France. This paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing new statistics to provide quantitative insights into the long-term changes in French wages from a gender perspective. More specifically, we aim to answer three main questions. First, what was the evolution of the gender wage gap in France in the very long run? Second, did all regions experience the same evolution or did regional differences exist? Relatedly, when did the well-known nineteenth century differences in gender wage inequality first appear? Lastly, which factors can account for the observed patterns? To address these concerns, we devise a new approach for the estimation of gender wage gaps in historical perspective that we call ‘matched pairs approach.’ We use information from primary and secondary sources to create an original dataset of women 's and men 's wages in France, covering the period 1300-1850.JEL Classifications
- N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy