Atack, Jeremy; Bateman, Fred; Margo, Robert A. - 2021
average monthly wages across establishments. We find a marked increased in wage inequality over the period, an increase that … cannot be explained by biases in the data or changes in census enumeration procedures. Based on log wage regressions on … establishment characteristics we compute a decomposition of the change in wage inequality between 1850 and 1880. The decomposition …