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This article investigates the characteristics of early settlers on the midwestern farming frontier, the correlates of their geographic mobility, and the determinants of their wealth. Using evidence drawn from the 1850, 1860, and 1870 federal censuses we find average rates of growth of wealth over time that were considerably above the national average, a steeper cross-sectional relationship between wealth and age than those found for contemporary national samples, and a substantial positive effect of early arrival on the frontier on wealth levels. Very high levels of economic opportunity may have been a characteristic of the farming frontier.

The life cycles of income and wealth form important traces of the economic history of households. Comparisons of cross-sectional estimates of the age-wealth profiles from 1774 to 1962 reveal little change in the basic pattern although crosssectional age-income or earnings profiles peak later in modern periods because of the increased investment in human capital.The wealth-income ratio appears to be declining. Multivariate regressions for Utah households show wealth-income patterns consistent with a life cycle model based on smoothing of consumption with little interaction between age and other determinants of economic position. Foreign birth has a positive effect on income while reducing wealth.

The economics of David Ricardo and the contemporary evidence for the economic importance of information suggest that time of entry into an economy should be an important determinant of wealth. This hypothesis is validated for nineteenth-century Utah, since time of entry into the economy had a larger impact on the level of wealth than did occupation, birthplace, sex, region of settlement, or age. This finding suggests that the effect on wealthholding of variables often given a discriminatory interpretation such as foreign birth may be overstated if time of entry into the economy is ignored. It also helps to explain the increase in inequality as the settlement process continues.returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

A knowledge of the distribution of income in different professions has a variety of policy implications and uses. Important applications include being able to make competitive salary offers for potential employees as well as helping to retain values employees through appropriate financial incentives. In some professions, salary data are readily available, and in others, data are limited. In academics the amount of salary data available is very diverse. In one study, Oklahoma State University publishes the highest, lowest and mean salaries by rank and discipline for different Carnegie Research Classifications. This paper outlines and approach, using order statistics and a Burr distribution, to utilize the information available from the Oklahoma State Survey to estimate underlying probability density functions for salary distributions. Given the estimated distribution, deciles can be estimated which facilitate an analysis of salary structure. The methodology is applied to estimate the salary distribution of statistics professors.