Price Fishback
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1063363 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Price Fishback |
| NOMBRES | Price |
| APELLIDO | Fishback |
| FIRMA | FISHBACK P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Arizona |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 61 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 275 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1983 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The impact of progressive era labor regulations on annual earnings and employment in manufacturing in the USA, 1904–1919
We analyze the impact of the broad range of state labor regulations on employment and annual earnings in manufacturing for wage earners and salaried workers using a new panel data set for the 48 US states in 1904, 1909, 1914, and 1919. The effects of state labor regulations influenced the labor market for wage earners and had virtually no effect on the market for salaried workers. Fixed effects analysis shows that increases in a newly developed l…
Introduction to special issue of explorations in economic history on the impacts of World War II on the U.S. economy
The impact of World War II Army service on income and mobility in the 1960s by ethnoracial group
We link the 1940 full-count Census to World War II enlistment records and 1969 administrative tax returns to study how WWII service in the Army and Army Airforce impacted the income and mobility of non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American male Army veterans relative to their non-Army counterparts in 1969. The size of our data set provides enough power to shed new light on previously understudied groups, such as Hispanics, A…
Discrimination, Migration, and Economic Outcomes
This paper examines the individual and aggregate costs of ethnic discrimination. Studying Germans in the United States during World War I, an event that abruptly downgraded their previously high social standing, we show that anti-German sentiment was strongly associated with counties’ casualties in the war, leading to subsequent outmigration of Germans. Such relocation to evade discrimination was costly for German workers. However, counties with …
New Evidence on Redlining by Federal Housing Programs in the 1930s
The Holc Maps
During the late 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent of the observed concentration of black househol…
The Rise of American Minimum Wages, 1912-1968
This paper studies the judicial, political, and intellectual battles over minimum wages from the early state laws of the 1910s through the peak in the real federal minimum in 1968. Early laws were limited to women and children and were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court between 1923 and 1937. The first federal law in 1938 initially exempted large portions of the workforce and set rates that became effectively obsolete during World War II…
Collateral Damage
The Great Depression of the 1930s involved a severe disruption in the supply of home mortgage credit. This paper empirically identifies a mechanism lying behind this credit crunch: the impairment of lenders' balance sheets by illiquid foreclosed real estate. With data on hundreds of building and loans (B&Ls), the leading mortgage lenders in this period, we find that the overhang of foreclosed real estate explains about 30 percent of the drop in n…
Social Insurance and Public Assistance in the Twentieth-Century United States
The growth of American governments in the twentieth century included large increases in funds for social insurance and public assistance. Social insurance has increased far more than public assistance, so "rise in the social insurance state" is a far better description of the century than "rise in the welfare state." The United States has increased total spending in these areas as much or more as have European countries, but the U.S. spending has…
Effects of New Deal Spending and the downturns of the 1930s on private labor markets in 1939/1940
The Impact of World War II on the Demand for Female Workers in Manufacturing
Most studies of female workers in the 1940s focus on labor supply. We use the basics of supply and demand to measure the impact of WWII on the short- and medium-run demand for female workers in manufacturing. Demand rose for both salaried and production female workers during the war and then fell after the war. However, the post-war demands for both groups were substantially higher than before the war and higher than the levels that would have be…
Did Inequality in Farm Sizes Lead to Suppression of Banking and Credit in the Late Nineteenth Century
This article creates a new database that covers all U.S. banks in the census years between 1870 and 1900 to test the interaction between inequality and financial development when the banking system was starting over from scratch. A fixed-effects panel regression shows that the number of banks per thousand people in the South has a strong positive relationship with the size of farm operations. This suggests that large southern farm operators welco…
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations
I was honored that Lee Alston asked me to be the convener for the Nevins Prize Competition this year. There were close to a dozen submissions spanning a
The role of Southern political power in Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself
The Multiplier for Federal Spending in the States During the Great Depression
To estimate the impact of federal spending on state incomes, we develop an annual panel data set between 1930 and 1940. Using panel methods we estimate that an added dollar of federal spending in the state increased state per capita income by between 40 and 96 cents. The point estimates for nonfarm grants are higher and for AAA farm grants are much smaller and negative in some cases. The spending led to increase in durable good spending on automo…
Flip the Switch
To isolate the impact of access to electricity on local economies, we examine the impact of the Rural Electrification Administration low-interest loans in the 1930s. The REA provided loans to cooperatives to lay distribution lines to farms and aid in wiring homes. Consequently, the number of rural farm homes electrified doubled in the United States within five years. We develop a panel data set for the 1930s and use changes within counties over t…
Health on the Home Front
The view that the US economy and living standards benefited from mobilization for World War II is commonplace. The main source of evidence is aggregate comparisons of standard macroeconomic variables over the Great Depression and war years. In this paper, we use newly collected data on infant health and industrial accidents to document changes in health conditions during World War II. The findings suggest that infant health and work conditions de…
Hard times in the land of plenty
Was the Great Depression a cause or correlate of significant mortality declines? An epidemiological response to Granados
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to Dr Granados’ misunderstanding of our paper.1 First, we cannot envisage any plausible mechanism explaining the short-term relationship between the Great Depression and cancer outcomes he describes. Although healthcare can now improve survival for some cancers, and a recession might affect access to care, the Great Depression predated the widespread use of effective cancer treatments. Second, turning to i…
New deal or no deal in the Cotton South
Did the New Deal solidify the 1932 Democratic realignment
SecondWorldWar spending and local economic activity inUScounties, 1939-58
Studies of the development of local economies often point to large-scaleSecondWorldWar military spending as a source of economic growth, even though spending declined sharply after demobilization. We examine the relationship between war spending per capita and the changes in economic activity inUScounties between 1939 before the war and a period several years after the war. In the longer term counties receiving more war spending per capita during…
What Was New About the New Deal?
During the presidential election of 1932 Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal for the American people.Our goal is to describe the changes wrought by the New Deal.To what extent did the New Deal expand existing programs?What new programs were created at all levels of government?How did the Federal government take over programs that had previously been the responsibility of state and local governments?We then survey the recent research that exami…
Relief During the Great Depression in A ustralia and A merica
I compare and contrast relief efforts by governments in response to the extraordinary unemployment of the G reat D epression in the US and A ustralia. The effectiveness of relief spending in A merica at the local level is discussed using recent studies estimating the relationship between relief spending and various demographic measures. I develop a new panel data set for the A ustralian states from 1929 through 1939. Increased income in manufactu…
Banking crises and mortality during the Great Depression
BACKGROUND: Previous research suggests that the Great Depression led to improvements in public health. However, these studies rely on highly aggregated national data (using fewer than 25 data points) and potentially biased measures of the Great Depression. The authors assess the effects of the Great Depression using city-level estimates of US mortality and an underlying measure of economic crisis, bank suspensions, at the state level. METHODS: Ca…
Did New Deal Grant Programs Stimulate Local Economies? A Study of Federal Grants and Retail Sales During the Great Depression
Using data on New Deal grants to each U.S. county from 1933 to 1939, we estimate how relief and public works spending and payments to farmers through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration influenced retail consumption. On a per capita basis, we find that an additional dollar of public works and relief spending was associated with a 44 cent increase in 1939 retail sales. In contrast, the AAA seems to have had a negative effect on retail sales…
The impact of New Deal expenditures on mobility during the Great Depression
Using county-level data on federal New Deal expenditures on public works and relief and Agricultural Adjustment Administration payments to farmers, this paper empirically examines the New Deal’s impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net-migration measure for each county as the difference between the Census’s reported population change from 1930 to 1940 and the natural increase in population (births minus infant deaths…
Banking crises and mortality during the Great Depression
BACKGROUND: Previous research suggests that the Great Depression led to improvements in public health. However, these studies rely on highly aggregated national data (using fewer than 25 data points) and potentially biased measures of the Great Depression. The authors assess the effects of the Great Depression using city-level estimates of US mortality and an underlying measure of economic crisis, bank suspensions, at the state level. METHODS: Ca…
Socializing Security
Socializing Security examines the early movement for worker-security legislation in the United States. It focuses on a group of academic economists who became leading proponents of social insurance and protective labor legislation during the first decades of the twentieth century. These economists--including John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely--founded the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL). As intellectuals and political activists,…
SecondWorldWar spending and local economic activity inUScounties, 1939-58
Studies of the development of local economies often point to large-scaleSecondWorldWar military spending as a source of economic growth, even though spending declined sharply after demobilization. We examine the relationship between war spending per capita and the changes in economic activity inUScounties between 1939 before the war and a period several years after the war. In the longer term counties receiving more war spending per capita during…
Precautionary Saving, Insurance, and the Origins of Workers' Compensation
In this article, the authors test whether the introduction of social insurance has led to a reduction in private insurance purchases and precautionary saving by examining the introduction of workers' compensation. Their empirical analysis is based on the financial decisions of over 7,000 households surveyed for the 1917-19 Bureau of Labor Statistics cost-of-living study. The authors find that the presence of workers' compensation at least partial…
Workplace safety during the progressive era
The Multiplier for Federal Spending in the States During the Great Depression
To estimate the impact of federal spending on state incomes, we develop an annual panel data set between 1930 and 1940. Using panel methods we estimate that an added dollar of federal spending in the state increased state per capita income by between 40 and 96 cents. The point estimates for nonfarm grants are higher and for AAA farm grants are much smaller and negative in some cases. The spending led to increase in durable good spending on automo…
Institutional Change, Compensating Differentials, and Accident Risk in American Railroding, 1892–1945
The labor markets in the railroad industry went through extensive institutional changes between 1890 and 1945. Federal laws increased railroad employers' liability for workplace accidents in several stages. Unions expanded to cover more occupations. The federal government set railroad wages during World War I and then mediated and arbitrated a large number of collective bargaining disputes between 1920 and 1945. We examine how these changes in in…
New Evidence on Redlining by Federal Housing Programs in the 1930s
Flip the Switch
To isolate the impact of access to electricity on local economies, we examine the impact of the Rural Electrification Administration low-interest loans in the 1930s. The REA provided loans to cooperatives to lay distribution lines to farms and aid in wiring homes. Consequently, the number of rural farm homes electrified doubled in the United States within five years. We develop a panel data set for the 1930s and use changes within counties over t…
The Durable Experiment
In the early 1910s state governments debated the private versus public underwriting of workers' compensation risk. The choices they made established the existing system today and set the stage for later debates over the government's underwriting of unemployment, health, and disability risks. This article offers both quantitative and case-study analyses of states' original choices between public and private insurance. Monopoly state funds were ado…
Square Deal” or Raw Deal? Market Compensation for Workplace Disamenities, 1884–1903
Early twentieth-century social reformers claimed that public insurance was necessary because employers ignored the financial needs of their unemployed, injured, or ill workers. Reformers dismissed the idea that competition in the labor market would boost the wages of workers who faced greater chances of job-related financial distress. This article reports a test of the compensating-wage-difference hypothesis on wage samples of men, women, and chi…
Hard times in the land of plenty
Debt peonage in postbellum Georgia
The Dynamics of Relief Spending and the Private Urban Labor Market During the New Deal
We examine the dynamic relationships between relief spending and local private labor markets using a panel data set of relief, private employment, and private earnings. Positive shocks to relief during the First New Deal were followed by increased private employment and earnings, consistent with demand stimulus in that period. On the other hand, increases in work relief spending during the Second New Deal were followed by decreased employment and…
The Impact of the New Deal on Black and White Infant Mortality in the South
An Alternative View of Violence in Labor Disputes in the Early 1900s
New deal or no deal in the Cotton South
The Political Economy of Workers' Compensation Benefit Levels, 1910–1930
Firm-specific evidence on racial wage differentials and workforce segregation in Hawaii's sugar industry
The Impact of World War II on the Demand for Female Workers in Manufacturing
Most studies of female workers in the 1940s focus on labor supply. We use the basics of supply and demand to measure the impact of WWII on the short- and medium-run demand for female workers in manufacturing. Demand rose for both salaried and production female workers during the war and then fell after the war. However, the post-war demands for both groups were substantially higher than before the war and higher than the levels that would have be…
The impact of World War II Army service on income and mobility in the 1960s by ethnoracial group
We link the 1940 full-count Census to World War II enlistment records and 1969 administrative tax returns to study how WWII service in the Army and Army Airforce impacted the income and mobility of non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American male Army veterans relative to their non-Army counterparts in 1969. The size of our data set provides enough power to shed new light on previously understudied groups, such as Hispanics, A…
The Holc Maps
During the late 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent of the observed concentration of black househol…
Did Inequality in Farm Sizes Lead to Suppression of Banking and Credit in the Late Nineteenth Century
This article creates a new database that covers all U.S. banks in the census years between 1870 and 1900 to test the interaction between inequality and financial development when the banking system was starting over from scratch. A fixed-effects panel regression shows that the number of banks per thousand people in the South has a strong positive relationship with the size of farm operations. This suggests that large southern farm operators welco…
The Distribution of the Income in the Great Depression
State-level estimates of income shares for the top one and five percent of the population are presented for 1929, 1933, and 1939. Significant cross-sectional variation is found in 1929, but the range narrows as the shares fall dramatically to 1933. Analysis indicates that property incomes influence the shares but provides little evidence of a tradeoff between per capita income and inequality as measured by the shares
Employment Conditions of Blacks in the Coal Industry, 1900–1930
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Segregation in Job Hierarchies
When blacks began to leave the South, one of their first stops was the West Virginia coal fields. There they met with reasonable success. Until the Depression, high-paying machine jobs were open to them and job segregation had almost no impact on their wages, but management positions were off-limits with a few exceptions for all-black workforces. The findings suggest two patterns worth more attention in studies of other industries
Did Coal Miners “Owe Their Souls to the Company Store”? Theory and Evidence from the Early 1900s
Although coal companies may have tried to exploit a local-store monopoly, company-store prices in nonunion areas were appreciably limited by competition from other stores and mines in the same labor market. Company stores persisted in part by lowering transactions costs. Prices at company stores were generally similar to those at nearby independent stores, and higher wages may have compensated for higher store prices at isolated mines. Conditions…
Workplace safety during the progressive era
Can Competition among Employers Reduce Governmental Discrimination? Coal Companies and Segregated Schools in West Virginia in the Early 1900s
The Quality of Services in Company Towns
Coal company towns were infamous, being described as exploitive, and charged with providing low-quality services, like sanitation. Yet, the quality of sanitation in coal towns in 1922 appears similar to that in cities of similar size, although lagging behind that in major cities. Within the coal region, company and independent towns provided similar levels of sanitation. The quality of sanitation in company towns varied in response to cost-relate…
Debt peonage in postbellum Georgia
Firm-specific evidence on racial wage differentials and workforce segregation in Hawaii's sugar industry
Narrowing the Black-White Gap in Child Literacy in 1910
Price V. Fishback, John H. Baskin, Narrowing the Black-White Gap in Child Literacy in 1910: The Roles of School Inputs and Family Inputs, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), pp. 725-728
Soft Coal, Hard Choices
This is a study of the economic lives of American bituminous coal miners in the early part of this century. Most studies of labor in coal mining focus on the struggle to organize unions. This study offers a broader, more quantitative picture of the labor market, making use of economic theory and statistics, and emphasizing competition among employers for labor, the legal environment, the development of institutions in response to transaction cost…
The Coal Labor Market, 1890–1930
To see how well the analytical framework fits the coal industry, this chapter describes the coal labor market in the early 1900s. The coal labor market boomed through World War I and then began to stagnate, although even during the boom coal mining experienced downturns. Coal miners most commonly exercised voice (collective action) through the United Mine Workers of America, who had developed a stronghold in the Central Competitive Field by 1902,…
The Miners’ Choices
Coal miners had two means of improving their conditions: voice and exit. They could band either together in labor unions and raise their collective voices, using strikes to focus attention on their grievances, or each miner could act alone moving to other mines or other industries to improve his position. The impact of exit often is ignored or described as inconsequential. Yet it was a powerful force in improving the economic welfare of the miner…
Square Deal” or Raw Deal? Market Compensation for Workplace Disamenities, 1884–1903
Early twentieth-century social reformers claimed that public insurance was necessary because employers ignored the financial needs of their unemployed, injured, or ill workers. Reformers dismissed the idea that competition in the labor market would boost the wages of workers who faced greater chances of job-related financial distress. This article reports a test of the compensating-wage-difference hypothesis on wage samples of men, women, and chi…
Institutional Change, Compensating Differentials, and Accident Risk in American Railroding, 1892–1945
The labor markets in the railroad industry went through extensive institutional changes between 1890 and 1945. Federal laws increased railroad employers' liability for workplace accidents in several stages. Unions expanded to cover more occupations. The federal government set railroad wages during World War I and then mediated and arbitrated a large number of collective bargaining disputes between 1920 and 1945. We examine how these changes in in…
Soft Coal, Hard Choices
This is a study of the economic lives of American bituminous coal miners in the early part of this century. Most studies of labour in coal mining focus on the struggle to organize unions. This study offers a broader, more quantitative picture of the labour market, making use of economic theory and statistics, and emphasizing competition among employers for labour, the legal environment, the development of institutions in response to transactions …
Soft Coal, Hard Choices
An Alternative View of Violence in Labor Disputes in the Early 1900s
Precautionary Saving, Insurance, and the Origins of Workers' Compensation
In this article, the authors test whether the introduction of social insurance has led to a reduction in private insurance purchases and precautionary saving by examining the introduction of workers' compensation. Their empirical analysis is based on the financial decisions of over 7,000 households surveyed for the 1917-19 Bureau of Labor Statistics cost-of-living study. The authors find that the presence of workers' compensation at least partial…
The Durable Experiment
In the early 1910s state governments debated the private versus public underwriting of workers' compensation risk. The choices they made established the existing system today and set the stage for later debates over the government's underwriting of unemployment, health, and disability risks. This article offers both quantitative and case-study analyses of states' original choices between public and private insurance. Monopoly state funds were ado…
Socializing Security
Socializing Security examines the early movement for worker-security legislation in the United States. It focuses on a group of academic economists who became leading proponents of social insurance and protective labor legislation during the first decades of the twentieth century. These economists--including John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely--founded the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL). As intellectuals and political activists,…
The Political Economy of Workers' Compensation Benefit Levels, 1910–1930
The Impact of the New Deal on Black and White Infant Mortality in the South
A Prelude to the Welfare State
Can the New Deal’s three Rs be rehabilitated? A program-by-program, county-by-county analysis
Economics (53 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Business (23 obras) · Labour economics (19 obras) · Demographic economics (18 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Geography (17 obras) · Demography (15 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Economic growth (13 obras)