ABSTRACT
This chapter shows what economists studying the family can learn from historical data, and also shows how economic methods can be used to understand social history. It explores why children worked, using microlevel data from a late nineteenth century American city. Economists have generally analyzed the first topic within a household production framework, stressing the allocation of the husband’s and wife’s time. They have approached the second in terms of the economics of fertility and quantity–quality tradeoffs in child production. A large sample of microlevel data has been collected by the Philadelphia Social History Project and has been linked to other nineteenth century records, such as the Federal Manufacturing Census, business directories, and transportation routes. Male heads of households in nineteenth century Philadelphia had varied employment opportunities in the city, although occupations were somewhat segmented among the many ethnic groups.
