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This project comprises three databases containing data on firms, products, costs. inputs, outputs, and technology for 448 products made by 70 textile manufacturing firms surveyed over the period 1888-1890 in 16 states and published in the Seventh Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Vol. I (1892).

The firms' names and locations (except region: north or south) were originally hidden, in order to obtain cooperation in revealing firms' competitive data to the U.S. Commissioner of Labor. However, scholars have since discovered most of the textile mill names through careful matching of information in the report with other sources (see Doane pp. 51-54). Identification of each firm permitted augmenting the data (e.g., transportation costs) using other sources.

Data were assembled by Doane for his doctoral dissertation research, which analyzed shifts in textile manufacturing after 1880. He evaluated statements by economic historians about the causes of the decline of northern manufacturing. His goal was to evaluate common assertions against empirical evidence in an explicit argument form grounded in economic theory. To this end, he used many data sources to measure and compare manufacturing cost, productivity, and quality of textiles made by firms located in the northern and southern regions.

Doane transformed and augmented the Commissioner's data, adding categorical variables and imputed costs (transportation, interest, depreciation) to the Commissioner's original data. To adjust for varying cloth width (and thereby facilitate product comparison, classification, and coding) Doane transformed the Commissioner's cost per linear yard to cents per square yard.
Originally (1968-1970) the data were keypunched onto IBM cards. In 2019, Doane (then retired from a 44-year academic career) converted, cleaned, and reformatted his data to Excel format to make them available to modern scholars. The resulting databases comprise three Excel spreadsheets:

Doane Data B: Cost Per Linear Yard.xlsx (448 products, 41 variables, B1, B2, ... , B42) Doane Data C: Cost Per Square Yard.xlsx
(448 products, 51 variables, C1, C2, ... , C52) Doane Data F: Total Cost for Each Textile Mill (70 firms, 36 variables, F1, F2, ... , F32)

Product data are unweighted. However, scholars could, if desired, weight by firm size or other characteristics.

Response Rates: This project comprises three databases containing data on firms, products, costs. inputs, outputs, and technology for 448 products made by 70 textile manufacturing firms surveyed over the period 1888-1890 in 16 states and published in the Seventh Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Vol. I (1892). The U.S. Commissioner of Labor surveyed 84 firms, but 14 had so much missing information that analysis would not be productive. The resulting 70 firms and 448 products in these databases are best viewed not as a sample, but essentially as a population of all the known U.S. textile manufacturers at the time.
Firm names and locations (except region: north or south) were originally hidden, in order to obtain cooperation in revealing firms' competitive data to the U.S. Commissioner of Labor. However, scholars have since discovered most of the textile mill names through careful matching of information in the report with other sources (see Doane pp. 51-54). Identification of each firm permitted augmenting the data (e.g., transportation costs) using other sources.

Presence of Common Scales: Data include ratio data (e.g., cost, cloth parameters) and categorical data (e.g., region, product name, state). Each database is intended to be largely self-documenting so that variable types will be apparent.