Differences in Regional Prices: The United States, 1851–1880

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine cost-of-living differences among the various regions of the United States during a thirty-year interval of the nineteenth century. We do this by constructing regional price indexes for the years 1851–1880 using two different base years for pur calculations, 1860 and 1880. The results indicate that the cost of living differed substantially among regions, and specifically that it was lower in the American Midwest than in the East. Although one might have expected these differences among regions to narrow as regional and national markets developed and improved, we find no evidence that they did during this thirty-year period.

The Resolution of the Labor-Scarcity Paradox

“…Value of output is deflated by a regional price index (Coelho and Shepherd, 1974). Labor input is measured by total employment with one additional worker per firm added to correct for entrepreneurial labor input (Sokoloff, 1984b).…”

Shifts in the Nineteenth-Century Phillips Curve Relationship

“…where is the logarithm of the price index of region i at time t. Using the Coelho and Shepherd (1974) indices of regional retail prices based on the Weeks Report (they exclude the South Atlantic and Western regions) as the price data, we see that the variance of regional price changes decreased by about 30 percent between the decade of the 1850's and that of the 1870's. '5…”

The North–South Wage Gap before and after the Civil War

“…Wright rejected this explanation on empirical grounds, drawing his evidence from Coehlo and Shepherd's (1974) regional cost of living indices, which span the period from 1850 to 1890.…”