Search

The growth of real wage before the US Civil War appeared to be slow and stationary. The distribution of wages during the antebellum period was altered by the changes in labor demand and labor supply, which is similar to what happened in the US in 1970. Factor markets that distributed labor from low to high value sites helped the antebellum development in the US. Furthermore, the nominal wage gap between non-farm and farm workers is found to be significant if geographic differences were taken into account

A study was conducted to evaluate the impact of the US Great Depression in the 1930s on employment and unemployment levels. The study considers conventional statistics for the US labor market and also focuses on disaggregated studies of the two economic variables. Results show that an exclusive focus on aggregate labor statistics incurs a possible risk of generating facts which do not perfectly describe the events of the 1930s. In addition, diverse conditions and census microdata must be considered for analyzing such major economic events.

An estimated 86% of 16-to-19-year-old black males in southern states participated in the labor force in 1900, compared to only 34% in 1970. The labor-force participation rate declined by 27 percentage points between 1950 and 1970. Researchers have attributed this post-1950 decline to decreases in the demand for labor resulting from the minimum wage and the use of the mechanical cotton harvester. A better explanation would be that the increase in school enrollment by blacks led to a decrease in labor-force participation.