WAR AND PESTILENCE AS LABOR MARKET SHOCKS: U.S. MANUFACTURING WAGE GROWTH 1914–1919

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of mortalities from the 1918 influenza pandemic and World War I on wage growth in the manufacturing sector of U.S. states and cities from 1914–1919. The hypothesis is that both events decreased manufacturing labor supply, thereby initially increasing the marginal product of labor and wages. The results reveal that states and cities having had greater influenza mortalities experienced higher wage growth—roughly 2–3 percentage points for a 10% change in per capita mortalities. World War I combat mortalities also had a positive, but smaller, effect on wage growth. (JEL N62, N32, N92, I12)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.