The Value of Human Capital during the Second Industrial Revolution—Evidence from the U.S. Navy

This paper explores the role of human capital on earnings and other measures of job performance during the late 19th century. During this time, U.S. Naval ocers belonged either to a regular or an engineer corps and had tasks assigned to their specialized training and experience. To test for the eects of specialized skills on performance, we compile educational data from original-source Naval Academy records for the graduating classes of 1858 to 1905. We merge these with career data extracted from official Navy registers for the years 1859 to 1907. This compilation comprises one of the longest and earliest longitudinal records of labor market earnings, education and experience of which we are aware. Our results suggest that greater technical skill translated into higher earnings early in careers, but wage premia diminished as careers progressed. From this evidence we argue that technical progress was more skill-depreciating than skill-biased during this period.

Naval Engineering and Labor Specialization during the Industrial Revolution

This paper explores the roles of capital- and technology-skill complementarities in labor allocation decisions within the U.S. Navy. During the latter 19th century the ocer corps was highly specialized, and was split between groups of line and sta ocers. This was also a time of dramatic technological changes which aected nearly every facet of naval opera- tions. Specically, naval technological developments tended to be \engineering-biased," in that they raised the relative importance of engineer-oriented skills. This created a dilemma for the Navy, as it navigated the balance between the benets of a specialized workforce implementing increasingly complex technologies with rising communication and coordina- tion costs. We rst document the extent of capital- and technology-skill complementarities within the navy which fostered greater labor specialization. We then show how the Navy vitiated the specialized human capital of ocers by blending the corps. The study oers in- sights into how an industry undergoing wrenching technological changes managed its labor and human capital allocation to help the U.S. become a world class naval power.

Teenage dropouts and drug use: Does the specification of peer group structure matter?

Economics of education Human capital Juvenile drug use Peer effects

Between the Dockyard and the Deep Blue Sea: Retention and Personnel Economics in the Royal Navy

This paper tackles some issues in personnel economics using the career profiles of British naval officers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We ask how promotions, payouts, positions, and peers affect worker retention. Random variation in task assignments and job promotions allows us to explore factors that affect retention of personnel. We develop a number of key insights. Firm-specific human capital accumulation bolsters retention, while technological changes can undo some of this effect. Other challenges to worker retention include lack of promotion opportunities, and "exit contagion" from exits of former peers. Modernizing organizations may need to enhance promotion opportunities and reorganize certain tasks, or else face loss of skilled personnel

“Gavroche Outside”: Street Capital(ism) and the Ethnobiography of a French Thug

International audienceThis article presents the ethnobiography of a thug, thief, drug addict, and heroin dealer named Gavroche, who built up his “street capital” on the French punk and zonard scene. The text gives pride of place to Gavroche’s own words and as such is a firsthand document providing direct access to the meanings he gave to his own actions. Firmly grounded in these narratives of experience, the sociological interpretation that accompanies them examines the idea that the principles of capitalist entrepreneurship are reflected in criminal activities and shows that Gavroche’s life can be viewed as an existential paradigm of “street capitalism,” which reduces competitive relationships to their most violent and crude expression. In this article, ethnobiography therefore comes face-to-face with the “grand realities” of Capitalism, Entrepreneurship, Competition, and the Violence of the Marketplace but, as Clifford Geertz would put it, it “takes the capital letters off” these concepts, focusing instead on the intense details contained in the space of one life lived on the street and through illegal dealings