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A Golden Age? Unemployment and the American Labor Market, 1880–1910

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2004

JOHN A. JAMES  and
MARK THOMAS
JOHN A. JAMES
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Economics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903. E-mail: jaj8y@virginia.edu.
MARK THOMAS
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903. E-mail: mt4w@virginia.edu.
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Abstract

We calculate the natural rate of unemployment in 1909 by first estimating equations for the incidence and time lost in unemployment on a pooled dataset integrating the manuscript sample of the 1910 census and state BLS surveys and then simulating a counterfactual unemployment rate as if the economy had been on trend that year with business-cycle effects neutralized. Following a similar procedure for the 1960s, we find the natural rate in the earlier period to have been substantially higher. The demise of casual unskilled labor, or floaters, seems to have been an important contributory factor.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 959 - 994
Copyright
© 2003 The Economic History Association

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