Time and work in eighteenth-century London

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Stanford University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700019872
• 发表日期: 1998
• 页码: 29-58
• 关键词: industrial-revolution; PRODUCTIVITY; standard; GROWTH

摘要

Witnesses' accounts are used to analyze changes in working hours between 1750 and 1800. Two findings stand out. The article demonstrates that the information contained in witnesses' accounts allows us to reconstruct historical time-budgets and provides extensive tests of the new method. Estimates of annual labor input in 1749/63 and 1799/1803 are presented. It emerges that the number of annual working hours changed rapidly between the middle and the end of the eighteenth century. These findings have important implications for the issue of total factor productivity during the Industrial Revolution.