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This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453817
This paper introduces a new measure of residential segregation based on individual-level data. We exploit complete census manuscript files to derive a measure of segregation based upon the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. Our measure allows us to analyze segregation consistently and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457732
Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it's the Iberian colonists' fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457751
Has economic progress increased the relative earnings of females to males over the long run? Evidence on trends in the earnings gap for the last four decades appears to run counter to this hypothesis. Numerous data sources are used in this paper to piece together a 170-year history of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477187
This paper studies the evolution of income concentration in Japan from 1886 to 2002 by constructing long-run series of top income shares and top wage income shares, using income tax statistics. We find that (1) income concentration was extremely high throughout the pre-WWII period during which...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466104
antebellum fluctuations were more apparent than real; nominal wages, not labor quantities, did most of the adjusting. We analyze … data on real wages for laborers, artisans, and clerks across four regions (Northeast, North Central, South Atlantic, and … South Central) during 1821 to 1856. Various time-series econometric methods reveal that shocks to real wages persisted even …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012475839
Between 1880 and 1920, the US agricultural employment share fell from 50% to 25%. However, despite aggregate demand shifting away from their sector of specialization, rural labor markets saw faster wage growth and industrialization than non-agricultural parts of the US. We propose a spatial...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013388845
"Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010521497
The safety nets in high-income countries before 1900 and in low-income countries today were based on savings and aid from extended family, friends, charities, churches, and small amounts from local governments. Mutual societies and eventually insurance companies offered insurance against lost...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013210095
We present estimates of home ownership for African-American and white households from 1870 to 2007. The estimates pertain to a sample of households headed by adult men participating in the labor force but the substantive findings are unchanged if the analysis is extended to all households. Over...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461992