@techreport{NBERh0046,
 title = "Land, Labor and the Wage-Rental Ratio: Factor Price Convergence in the Late Nineteenth Century",
 author = "Kevin O'Rourke and Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamsmn",
 institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research",
 type = "Working Paper",
 series = "Historical Working Paper Series",
 number = "46",
 year = "1996",
 month = "November",
 URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/h0046",
 abstract = {This paper augments the new historical literature on factor price convergence. The focus is on the late nineteenth century, when economic convergence among the current OECD countries was dramatic; and the focus is on the convergence between Old World and New, by far the biggest participants in the global convergence during the period; and the focus is on land and labor, the two most important factors of production in the nineteenth century. Wage-rental ratios boomed in the Old World and collapsed in the New, moving the resource-rich and labor scarce New World closer to the resource-scarce and labor-abundant Old World. The paper uses both computable general equilibrium models and econometrics to identify the forces causing the convergence. These include: commodity price convergence and the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem of factor price equalization; migration, capital-deepening and frontier disappearance, factors stressed by Malthus, Ricardo, Wicksell and Viner; and factor-saving biases associated with induced-innovational theory, an endogenous response to relative factor scarcities.},
}