Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Guinnane, Timothy
Abstract
The first chapter studies the effect of factory electrification at the establishment level. Between 1900 and 1930, the share of power in American manufacturing coming from electricity grew from 10% to 80%. Although electrification has been attributed with dramatic productivity gains, data limitations have constrained previous research to rely on aggregate data. Using a newly-collected dataset covering manufacturers in North Carolina in the early 1900s, I examine the effects of electrification at the establishment level. Manufacturers who electrified increased their productivity and output relative to manufacturers who did not. The effects on workers were mixed. While electrification increased average wages, it also increased the return to skill and reduced the labor share. Delays in electricity adoption point to the importance of complementary innovations in electricity transmission and financial markets. The second chapter studies the use of incorporation by manufacturers. Firms choose from a menu of organizational forms. While the advantages of the corporation have been widely noted, many firms in the past and today chose to forgo incorporation and organized as individual proprietorships or partnerships. A growing literature in economic history has discussed the role of the corporation, but the scarcity of historical firm-level data has made it difficult to study how firms chose their form. I use a newly-collected establishment-level dataset covering North Carolina manufacturers in 1915 which describes whether each plant was owned by a corporation, partnership, or individual. I find that factories owned by corporations were larger, more productive, more capital-intensive, more likely to survive, and more likely to operate on a year- round basis. Differences in the amount of capital invested and industry explain much, though not all, of the apparent differences in productivity. Corporations accounted for less than half of the factories through the eighth decile of capital invested, suggesting that even though access to the corporate form was not legally restricted in this time and place, the costs of incorporation outweighed the benefits for most small- and medium-sized enterprises. The coexistence of corporations and partnerships in many industries suggests that neither form strictly dominated the other.
Recommended Citation
Damron, William Steadson, "Essays on the Economic History of the American South" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 950.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/950
