I am an economic historian who focuses on the role of women in the labor market.  My 2008 book, Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain, argues that, since strength was important in many occupations, lower wages do not necessarily imply discrimination.  In the less-skilled and more competitive portions of the labor market women were sorted into occupations where strength mattered the least and were paid market wages that matched their productivity.  Women did face discriminatory barriers imposed by union and professions, and these barriers appeared in less competitive portions of the labor market.  I have collected an extensive sample of English farm accounts (1740-1850), and I have used this sample to examine differences in employment and wages by gender.  Currently I am working on turn-of-the-century Swedish manufacturing workers with Maria Stanfors of Lund University, and I am using US Census of Manufacturing data to estimate relative female productivity and test for wage discrimination.

My teaching interests are wider.  I teach Labor Economics and Game Theory every spring.  Each fall I teach an economic history course; recently this course has focused on the Great Depression.  I periodically teach the Senior Seminar; in fall 2011 the focus was labor market discrimination.  In the fall of 2013 I am teaching a Freshman Tutorial focused on food.

B.A., Valparaiso University, 1989
Ph.D in Economics, Northwestern University, 1994

ECO 101 - Principles of Economics
ECO 213 - Topics in US Economic History: The Great Depression
ECO 224 - Economic and Political Development
ECO 241 - Game Theory
ECO 332 - Labor Economics
 

with Maria Stanfors, "Gender and Wage Growth: Evidence from Swedish Manufacturing c. 1900"
Presented at the Seventh World Congress of Cliometrics, Honolulu, June 2013

"The Agricultural Day-Labourer: A Quantitative Portrait"
Presented at the annual meetings of the British Agricultural History Society, York, April 2013
 

"Agriculture, 1700-1870," in Floud, Johnson, and Humphries, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

"The Seasonality of English Agricultural Employment: Evidence from Farm Accounts, 1740-1850," in Richard Hoyle, ed., The Farmer in England, 1650-1950, Ashgate, forthcoming.

"The Changing Economic Role of Women," in Whaples and Parker, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History, Routledge, 2013.

with Maria Stanfors, "Was there a Family Gap in Late Nineteenth-Century Manufacturing? Evidence from Sweden," The History of the Family, 2012, 17:51-76. 

"Child Day-Labourers in Agriculture: Evidence from Farm Accounts, 1740-1850," Economic History Review, 2012, 65:1077-1099.

First Monograph Prize, Economic History Society, 2010.