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Looking for Work, Searching for Workers: American Labor Markets During Industrialization.

Article Excerpt
Looking for Work, Searching for Workers: American Labor Markets During Industrialization by Joshua L. ROSENBLOOM, New York: Cambridge University Press, 208 pp., ISBN 0-521-80780-8.

Market integration is a central feature of modern economic development. In very small countries, market integration refers mostly, or fully, to external trade. But in large countries such as the United States, market integration also proceeds--or does not--from within.

Looking for Work focuses on the formation of a national market for labour in the United States. Previous work on the evolution of labour markets bas generally used a simple labour demand-supply framework. This framework is central to Rosenbloom's book, but he goes beyond the black box to focus on the institutions that matched workers to employers. His central point is that the relevant institutions worked much better at allocating workers within the North or South than across the Mason-Dixon line until well into the twentieth century.

Looking for Work is divided into an introduction, five substantive chapters, and a conclusion. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 presents evidence...

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