IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v119y2004i4p1177-1215..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An Annual Index of U. S. Industrial Production, 1790–1915

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph H. Davis

Abstract

As a remedy for the notorious deficiency of pre-Civil War U. S. macroeconomic data, this study introduces an annual index of American industrial production consistently defined from 1790 until World War I. The index incorporates 43 quantity-based annual series (most entirely new) in the manufacturing and mining industries in a manner similar to the Federal Reserve Board's monthly industrial production index. The index changes our view of the growth and volatility of the U. S. economy before World War I. A direct implication of the index is that antebellum-postbellum differences in industrial volatility are statistically indistinguishable. The index also demonstrates that the pernicious deflationary depressions that purportedly followed the financial panics in 1837 and 1873 were actually rather mild recessions when expressed in real output.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph H. Davis, 2004. "An Annual Index of U. S. Industrial Production, 1790–1915," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(4), pages 1177-1215.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:119:y:2004:i:4:p:1177-1215.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/0033553042476143
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:119:y:2004:i:4:p:1177-1215.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.