This article develops the first comprehensive set of estimates of daily hours of work in 1880 using new data from the Census of Manufactures. We conclude that the average workday was almost exactly 10 hours in 1880—almost a decade earlier than hitherto supposed. Our statistical analysis also reveals small but statistically significant variations in hours between firms and industries, between regions, and by location. We also find that higher-paid workers probably substituted leisure for income, that total employment was unresponsive to hours, and that hours and days of employment during the year moved together.

Since the appearance of Gerschenkron's 1955 paper, economic historians have discussed extensively the industrial transformation of Italy from 1896 to 1908, which Gerschenkron claimed was the period of Italy's first big or great “spurt.” Those discussions, however, have been in terms of national aggregates. This article attempts to create instead a regional view of Italian industrialization for this period. My analysis of regional output for two benchmark years suggests there were three regional patterns of industrialization.

Economic historians have stressed the importance of households and household formation but have devoted little attention to the process of leaving home. Leaving home in Ireland is important because of households' role in post-Famine demographic patterns. A matched Irish manuscript census sample for 1901 and 1911 shows that Irish males left home later than females. Statistical tests show that much of this reflects an Irish inheritance system that led many males never to leave home. Other economic forces, such as labor market opportunities, often had opposite impacts on males and females.

An analysis of innovations in the eighteenth-century British textile industry is the basis for an evaluation of aggregate studies of invention during the Industrial Revolution, derived from patent evidence alone. Disaggregation of the data challenges recent generalizations concerning the pace and pattern of technical change over the period. Discontinuities in the nature of invention, promoting an acceleration in total factor productivity growth, are traced to the 1790s. Prior to that date, industrial development conformed to a pattern of Smithian growth, as manufacturers diversified their output in response to an expanding domestic market for consumer goods.

Education clauses in 3,478 immigrant servant contracts are used to measure the incidence of schooling versus informal instruction by location, age, and sex. The proportion of servants receiving education was high, over 20 percent being taught outside of schools. Education expanded between 1770 and 1800 through a net increase in schooling rather than because of a substitution of schooling for informal instruction. In the 1770s formal schooling in rural areas lagged behind that in urban, but achieved parity by 1800. Little difference in education was found based on gender.

Recent studies of job tenure raise the question of the appropriate duration statistic to use in historical research. This article compares duration measures and examines their empirical and theoretical implications for historical research on employment tenure. Using a variety of data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find that although there existed a sector of stable jobs, most industrial jobs were brief. Since World War I, however, there has been a sharp shift in the relative size and importance of the short- and long-term job sectors.

Wage gaps between farm and city are used to assess whether industrialization in late nineteenth-century France was choked off by peasants' alleged reluctance to move. If industry suffered due to labor scarcity, wage gaps should have been large and rising. It turns out that the wage gap, when adjusted for costs of living and computed as an average of 20 regional wage gaps, was nil in 1852 and about 25 percent in 1892. Thus wage gaps were rising but were far smaller throughout the late nineteenth century than they were in England during similar stages of industrialization.

Once one of the richest countries in the world, Argentina has been in relative economic decline for most of the twentieth century. The quantitative records of income growth and accumulation date the onset of the retardation to around the time of the Great War, and patterns of aggregate saving and foreign borrowing show that scarcity of investable resources significantly frustrated interwar development. A demographic model of national saving demonstrates that the burdens of rapid population growth and substantial immigration depressed Argentine saving, contributing significantly to the demise of the Belle Époque following the wartime collapse of international financial markets.

This article examines the recent view that economic distress was not an important cause of English immigration before 1860. Demographic information is used to show that characteristics of males on suspect passenger lists (those that listed only laborers) matched those of laborers on other lists. Based on this result and other information, laborers appear to be the dominant group of immigrants. Support is thus provided for the view that distress was the most important cause of immigration, even though many other immigrants were not fleeing economic distress.

Analysis of British capital market operations before 1914 has focused on institutional and investor behavior without fully considering entrepreneurial conduct. Consequently, those who argue that industrial performance was impaired because capital flows were obstructed by information blockages have overlooked the role company owners could play in shaping communication lines. The fund-raising techniques used by shipowners reveal that private capital attracted through preferential communication channels supported the rise of large-scale enterprise. Founders were not motivated by supply constraints, nor did they forego profits to retain control. Rather, shipowners created asymmetric information flows to attract resources and shape institutional development.

Endogenous growth theories suggest that market integration will be more conducive to economic development when the previously isolated regions have large stocks of human capital. This paper uses the level of per capita patenting in nineteenth-century Virginia to measure this human capital. By the end of the 1870s, the rail network of the Old Dominion was rapidly being integrated with the rest of the nation. Inventiveness spread throughout northern Virginia, but the former plantation areas of the state fell behind.

The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital—savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control.