Inequalities on the eve of mass migration: Agricultural holdings in Sweden and The United States in 1845–1850

Abstract

A comparison of economic conditions in Sweden and America in the middle of the 19th century is of vital interest because it highlights the push-and-pull aspects of migration to America. One method of analysis of this topic would be to compare the distribution of wealth in real estate in Sweden in 1845, say, with that in Illinois or Wisconsin in 1850, or with the distribution in Minnesota in 1860, or, more technically, for Swedes in those states and at those times. Surely the results of such a comparison would point vividly to the fact that the average individual could do better in America; letters from America bear strong testimony that this indeed was true.     

Status and mortality: Is there a Whitehall effect in the United States?

The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United States using a 1930 cohort of white-collar employees at a leading firm – General Electric (GE). All had access to a corporate health and welfare program during a critical period associated with the health transition. I measure status using position in the managerial hierarchy, attendance at prestigious management training camps and promotions, none of which is associated with a Whitehall-like rank-mortality gradient. Instead, senior managers and executives experienced a 3–5-year decrease in lifespan relative to those in lower levels, with the largest mortality penalty experienced by individuals in the second level of the hierarchy. I discuss generalizability and potential explanations for this reversal of the Whitehall phenomenon using additional data on the status and lifespan of top business executives and US senators.     

Missed opportunities? Human welfare in Western Europe and the United States, 1913–1950

GDP suggests that the period 1913–1950 is one of missed opportunities for improving living standards in Europe. However, life in Europe during these years improved significantly, as citizens experienced dramatic declines in mortality, working time and inequality. To measure the contribution of these aspects to broader welfare, I apply a new theoretically-grounded indicator that, contrary to previous measures used in the literature, allows for a direct comparison with GDP across countries and time. I find that income underestimates welfare growth significantly (up to 2.2 percent annually) and that cross-country differences are larger and more persistent than other welfare measures imply. This article calls for a reappraisal of the evolution of living standards during the period 1913–1950 and, more generally, presents an application of a new indicator to measure multi-dimensional welfare in historical contexts.     

Emigration from the United Kingdom to the United States,Canada and Australia/New Zealand, 1870–1913: Quantity and quality

This paper revisits the determinants of emigration from the United Kingdom to the United States, Canada and Australia/New Zealand from 1870 to 1913. In the absence of restrictive immigration policies, the flow of emigration to these destinations responded to economic shocks and trends. Emigrants to Australia and New Zealand were more skilled on average than those heading across the Atlantic, a feature that does not correspond well with skill differentials in the manner predicted by the Roy model. While assisted passages (subsidised fares) increased the volume of emigration to Australia and New Zealand they cannot account for its higher skill content.     

An Analysis of Perceptions of Job Insecurity among White and Black Workers in the United States: 1977–2012

While objective measures indicate that the risk of job loss is higher for black workers than for white workers, there is little research on how what workers’ expectations of job loss differ by race. This study looks at how secure black and white workers are feeling about their jobs and how their perceptions of job insecurity have been affected by time trends and regional unemployment rates. I find that perceptions of job security of black male workers, older black workers, and black high school graduates have deteriorated relative to their white counterparts during the period 1977–2012. Among those who attended college, white workers’ perceived job insecurity has increased. Black blue-collar workers’ and construction workers’ perceptions of job insecurity also have increased relative to their white counterparts. Moreover, perceptions of job insecurity among several black groups, such as high school dropouts and old workers, are more sensitive to regional unemployment rates than their white counterparts.     

New Estimates of the United States–China BilateralTrade Balances

The United States and China have vastly different official estimates of the bilateral trade imbalance. The U.S. figures show that the United States had a merchandise trade deficit of US$68.7 billion vis-à-vis China in 1999 whereas the Chinese figures show that China had a merchandise trade surplus of only US$22.4 billion vis-à-vis the United States. There is a difference of US$46.3 billion. Which set of figures is right? It turns out that neither side is completely right. Various factors, such as f.o.b.–c.i.f. adjustments and treatments of re-exports and re-export markups, complicate the measurement of the bilateral trade balance between the United States and China. One important conclusion that emerges is that while U.S. trade statistics may be more reliable than Chinese trade statistics, even they are not completely accurate. By explicitly taking into account the aforementioned factors, the discrepancy between the adjusted U.S. and Chinese data on the bilateral trade balance in 1999 is narrowed from US$46.3 billion to US$4.8 billion, or approximately 10% of the initial figure. Our best estimate for the true U.S.–China bilateral merchandise trade balance for 1999 is US$47.8 billion, in China's favor. If we take into account the trade in services, in which the United States has traditionally enjoyed a surplus, the U.S.–China bilateral trade balance may be estimated at approximately US$45 billion in 1999. Compared with the U.S. trade deficit with Japan (over US$70 billion in 1999), the U.S.–China trade deficit, appropriately adjusted, is still significantly smaller. J. Japan. Int. Econ., March 2001, 15(1), pp. 102–130. Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064; and Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-6072. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: F10, F13.     

Dynamic linkages of stock prices between the BRICs and the United States: Effects of the 2008–09 financial crisis

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic linkages between the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and the United States in the mean and variance of stock prices for the period August 2, 2004, to April 30, 2010. In particular, we focus on the impact of the US financial crisis in September 2008 on the dynamic linkages between these stock prices. The sample period is divided into pre- and post-crisis periods in order to study the causal relationships in the mean and variance. The empirical results indicate that the international transmission of stock prices between the BRICs and the United States weakened in both the mean and variance on account of the 2008–09 US financial crisis.     

Job Satisfaction in the United States: Are Blacks Still More Satisfied?

Despite the substantial literature on the paradox of the happy female worker, research has been sparse in investigating race differences in job satisfaction. The last national level study on racial differences in job satisfaction was done in 1981 when, using national level U.S. data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Mature Men for 1966, 1969 and 1971, Bartel showed that blacks had significantly more job satisfaction and further, that this racial gap had widened during this time. Though the reasons for this gap and its widening were not investigated, it was suggested, in a close parallel to the reason for the contented female worker, that lower expectations, in this case due to discrimination in the labor market, could be a reasonable explanation. Surprisingly, since then, there have been only a handful of studies focused on smaller, specific groups. This paper exploits two U.S. national level data sets, the GSS and the NLSY 1997, to examine the racial gap in job satisfaction. Simple means show that blacks are much less satisfied than whites and moreover, this difference has persisted not only across genders but also across almost four decades. To isolate the pure race effect, a sequential process is adopted by first examining the simple difference in the means of job satisfaction, then, through probit estimation, seeing the impact of individual attributes, finally progressing to incorporation of job attributes. Probit estimates give robust results. Blacks are significantly less satisfied than whites even when income, benefits and occupations are controlled. However, this racial gap is greater in the case of women and younger black men. An exploratory analysis shows that when discrimination is accounted for, the satisfaction gap is further reduced and the race coefficients are rendered insignificant. Estimates with comparison income show that the satisfaction gap is driven by perceived discrimination and not necessarily discrimination as captured by comparison income. This highlights the importance of policy measures to reduce perceptual discrimination.     

Swedish iron exports to the United States, 1783–1860

Abstract

For about half the period reviewed in this article, the United States was the biggest purchaser of Swedish iron, having particularly close links with western Sweden. An earlier work analysed in detail how the character of the American demand exerted an influence on the organisation of iron sales in Gothenburg. The present article lays the main emphasis less on the local and more on the international aspects.¹ The exposition divides itself into four periods: a) the beginning of the market, 1783-1808; b) the war years, 1809-15; c) the era of high sales, 1816-42; and d) adaptation to new conditions, 1843-60.     

From boom to gloom: Brazilian labour productivity in manufacturing relative to the United States, 1912–2019

Whereas manufacturing seems to hold the key to modern economic growth, the role of manufacturing in economy-wide convergence across countries is debatable. One strand of scholarship argues that productivity levels in manufacturing tend to remain stable across countries, and that economy-wide convergence takes place through structural transformations. Another strand maintains that productivity levels of less-developed countries tend to approach those of developed countries unconditionally, and that deindustrialization thwarts economy-wide convergence. We examine productivity in Brazilian manufacturing relative to the United States, 1912–2019. The result shows dramatic swings in the Brazilian/US productivity ratio, increasing in the decades following the Second World War, peaking in the late 1970s at impressively high levels, and declining precipitously thereafter. This sluggish performance of Brazilian manufacturing since the peak in the late 1970s has probably hindered income convergence with richer countries.     

Global value chains and the “missing exports” of the United States

Many American multinational corporations have turned into factory-less. They outsource the production of their products to foreign companies and derive the largest share of their revenues from intellectual property and services embedded in physical products sold to international consumers. However, conventional trade statistics are compiled based on the value of goods crossing national borders, as declared to customs. The value added associated with intellectual property and services embedded in physical goods is not recorded as an export. Current trade statistics greatly underestimate US exports. In this paper, we use the case of Apple, the largest American consumer products company and a typical factory-less manufacturer, to illustrate the failure of conventional trade statistics to report actual US export capacity in the age of global value chains. According to our analysis of this case, if the value added of Apple intellectual property and services embedded in all Apple products sold to foreign consumers were counted as part of US exports, total US exports in 2015 would increase by 3.4%, and its trade deficit would decrease by 7.0%. In terms of bilateral trade, the value added under examination here would raise the US exports to China and Japan by 16.6% and 8.7% respectively, and lower its trade deficit with the two countries by 5.2% and 7.8% accordingly.     

Does It Get Better? Recent Estimates of Sexual Orientation and Earnings in the United States

Using 2013–2015 National Health Interview Survey data, we reproduce a well‐documented finding that self‐identified lesbians earn significantly more than comparable heterosexual women. These data also show — for the first time in the literature — that self‐identified gay men also earn significantly more than comparable heterosexual men, a difference on the order of 10% of annual earnings. We discuss several possible explanations for the new finding of a gay male earnings premium and suggest that reduced discrimination and changing patterns of household specialization are unlikely to be the primary mechanisms.     

Exchange Rate or Wage Changes in International Adjustment？ Japan and China versus the United States

I. IntroductionSeldom have the pages of the financial press in Europe and America been so full of graveeditorializing on the need for a major depreciation of the dollar to correct the “unsustainable”current account and trade deficits of the United States. Much of this international moralizingdirects the high-growth East Asian countries to stop pegging their currencies to the dollar– or, in China’s case, to allow a large appreciation of the renminbi before moving to unrestrictedfloating.…     

On forecasting the relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States

The article discusses the prospects of relations between China and the United States compared to the relations that have taken place between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. A comparison of relations between the two pairs of superpowers is made in the article based on the following parameters: the interaction of the superpowers in economic and financial sectors, the struggle for the world’s mineral resources, relations in the strategic nuclear sphere, naval rivalry, relationship in the land theaters, and conflicts in cyberspace.     

The settlement preferences of Scandinavian emigrants to the United States, 1850–1960

Abstract

In the past, text books have made a false distinction between the former agrarian structure of Denmark on the one hand and of the remaining Scandinavian countries on the other. The proper dividing line should intersect the kingdom of Sweden, since farmers in Norrland and Finland were peasant-proprietors at the opening of the modern age while elsewhere in Scandinavia they were generally tenants. Much of the land not owned by peasants belonged to the Crown or the churchy but neither of them practised large-scale farming save in exceptional instances. Thus it is of crucial importance to establish at the outset the extent of landownership by the nobility and by other ‘persons of standing’ (stõndspersoner) about 1600 and how this changed during the century. In Sweden noble landownership is defined to include even land held by feudal right (donationer) and freehold or crown land for which a noble has bought or been given the right to levy taxes (frälseköp). Its status as noble property is not affected by whatever proportion of it may be held as virtual peasant freehold with hereditary rights of use (bördsrätt) and security against eviction and incorporation into the tax-exempt demesne farm (säteri) of the feudal property; such a holding is called skattefräise hemman.