Productivity and effort: The labor-supply decisions of late Victorian coalminers

It is widely believed that one of the main causes of productivity decline i n British coalmining in the late nineteenth century was that when wage rate s increased, miners responded by reducing work effort and/or attendance. Ho wever, previous empirical studies have conflated behavioral responses with correlations between coal-seam quality and wage rates. Using individual pan el data from a single mine, I show that the short-ran wage elasticity of wo rker effort was in fact positive. The true elasticity of attendance is less clear, but there is no support for the idea that absenteeism increased whe n wage rates rose.