TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fishback,Price V.
AU  - Holmes,Rebecca
AU  - Allen,Samuel
TI  - Lifting the Curse of Dimensionality:  Measures of the Labor Legislation Climate in the States During the Progressive Era
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14167
PY  - 2008
Y2  - July 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14167
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14167.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Price V. Fishback
Department of Economics
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ  85721
Tel: 520/621-4421
Fax: 520/621-8450
E-Mail: pfishback@eller.arizona.edu

Rebecca A. Holmes
Cox Communications
E-Mail: rebecca.holmes@cox.com

Samuel Allen
Virginia Military Institute
341 Scott Shipp Hall
Lexington, VA 24450
E-Mail: allensk@vmi.edu
AB  - One of the most difficult problems in the social sciences is measuring the policy climate in societies.   Prior to the 1930s the vast majority of labor regulations in the U.S. were enacted at the state level.  In this paper we develop several summary measures of labor regulation that document the changes in labor regulation across states and over time during the Progressive Era.  The measures include an Employer-Share-Weighted Index (ESWI) that weights regulations by the share of workers affected and builds up the overall index from 17 categories of regulation; the number of pages of laws; appropriations for spending on labor issues per worker; and two nonparametric COORDINATES that summarize locations in a policy space.  We describe the pluses and minuses of the measures, how strongly they are correlated, and show the stories that they tell about the changes in labor regulation during the progressive era.  We then provide preliminary evidence on the extent to which the labor regulation measures are associated with political and economic correlates identified as important in histories of industrial relations and labor markets.
ER  -