Iron and Steel Shipbuilding Data File

Data files for

Selection and Firm Survival. Evidence from the Shipbuilding Industry, 1825-1914,

Review of Economics and Statistics, 87(1):26-36, February 2005.

There are two excel files: firms.xls contains basic information about shipyards; vessels.xls record information about individual vessels. Please remember that this data set covers only vessels with metal hulls with at least 20 tons displacement.

The variables in the files are as follows:

Firms.xls

Key Dates
Founding year	Year company was founded. This can be many years before entry into iron and steel shipbuilding.
Entry year	Year first metal vessel was built.
Last year	Last year recorded in dataset
Exit year	Last year of production in shipbuilding.
Closing year	Year company closed. This can be many years after exit from shipbuilding.
Prior Background	A set of dummy variables indicating whether the firm (or its founders) had previously been engaged in any of the following activities: foundry work, construction, manufacturer of steam engines, locomotive manufacture, railroads, naval engineering, metal shipbuilding (in another firm), wooden shipbuilding, or shipping. These are not mutually exclusive fields. The category "unknown" arises when I essentially know nothing about the firm.
Takeover of yard	Indicates if firm entered industry by purchasing an existing shipyard engaged in metal shipbuilding.
Firm location	City and state of yard.
Form of Exit	A set of dummy variables indicated why the firm exited: Bankruptcy, into a trust (such as the American Shipbuilding Corp.), merger, death or retirement of owner, exited industry but continued activities in other areas, firms was sold, a miscellaneous (but known) category, and unknown.

Vessels. xls

The following variables are self-explanatory:	Official number, year built, firm name, vessel type, gross tons, length, breadth, depth, hull material, propulsion system engine, who the vessel was built for, first home port
Year withdrawn and reason withdrawn	This is the year the vessel stops being registered, and the reason for the end of the registration (e.g. vessel was scrapped).
As usual, missing data means I don't know.

Download the zipped excel files

Much of the coding in the previous files are the result of subjective readings of firm histories. The file text_files.zip is a collection of word files contain the raw information collected in the process of constructing the data set. The files consist of items cut and paste from websites, copied form published histories, notes taken at regional and maritime museums, and so on. I am not a historian, so these files a rather messy, but they do contain a lot of information.

Download the zipped Word files

Further details about the industry, the data and coding decisions are available in the following paper:

The Iron and Steel Shipbuilding Data Set: Sources, Coverage, and Coding Decisions

September 2002

This article is a supporting document to the paper "Selection and Firm Survival. Evidence from the Shipbuilding Industry, 1825-1914" [Review of Economics and Statistics, 87(1):26-36, February 2005], and is not intended for publication. The article provides a basic description of data sources, coverage and limitations, along with coding decisions made for the purposes of statistical analysis.