The U.S. Capital Stock in the Nineteenth Century

This paper -- prepared for and presented at a meeting of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth -- describes a set of seven capital stock estimates for the U.S., distributed at decennial intervals, 1840 through 1900.The estimates link with Raymond Goldsmith's work on the twentieth century to form a capital stock series covering well over 100 years of U.S. history. The paper describes the theoretical underpinnings of the new estimates, the sources of the evidence from which they were constructed, the types of estimating procedures followed, and the relationships of the new series to other economic aggregates. A few of the ways in which the series illuminates the nature of the nineteenth century U.S. economy and the course of U.S. economic development are taken up.

Productivity in American Whaling: The New Bedford Fleet in the Nineteenth Century

From the end of the War of 1812 until the Civil War the New Bedford whaling fleet grew spectacularly; thereafter it declined, equally spectacularly. By the end of the century New Bedford's day was over. During the 88 years of this period, the technical configuration of the fleet, the hunting grounds visited, and the types of whales pursued all changed dramatically, and more than once. The literature on whaling suggests that the collapse of the industry was due, in part, to declining productivity, occasioned by the disappearance of the whales (because of over-hunting) and the deterioration of the quality of labor. The shifts in the composition of the fleet are viewed, chiefly, as the result of efforts by whalemen to overcome their problems. In this paper, productivity data (superlative indexes), by voyage, are employed in multiple regression analysis to trace the relationships between the changes in the composition of the fleet and productivity. The propositions that declining labor quality and whale stocks had important consequences for productivity are subjected to test, while the impacts of technical changes on productivity are measured.