A Golden Age? Unemployment and the American Labor Market, 1880–1910

Abstract

We calculate the natural rate of unemployment in 1909 by first estimating equations for the incidence and time lost in unemployment on a pooled dataset integrating the manuscript sample of the 1910 census and state BLS surveys and then simulating a counterfactual unemployment rate as if the economy had been on trend that year with business-cycle effects neutralized. Following a similar procedure for the 1960s, we find the natural rate in the earlier period to have been substantially higher. The demise of casual unskilled labor, or floaters, seems to have been an important contributory factor.