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Inequality in Landownership in the American Midwest, 1850-60:
The Role of the Railroad

Jeremy Atack (Vanderbilt University)
Robert A. Margo (Boston University)

PAPER (pdf) Presentaion (pdf)

Abstract:

A central question of nineteenth century American economic history which has preoccupied scholars as diverse as Simon Kuznets, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson is whether economic development was accompanied by increasing inequality. In this paper we study a particular indicator of economic inequality – the incidence of land ownership among adult men – and its relationship to a putative causal factor in nineteenth American growth – the so-called Transportation Revolution, focusing specifically on the diffusion of the railroad.

We will revise the earlier draft and also make use of a newer version of the transportation database that contains distance-adjusted measures of rail access – for example, the share of a county’s land area that is within a specified distance of a railroad. Preliminary analysis indicates that the new measures are better indicators of rail access than the dummy variable indicator used in our earlier work. 

The authors are, respectively, Professor of Economics and History, Vanderbilt University, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research; Professor of Economics, Boston University, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research