This paper provides new series of building wages for 18th-century Madrid. At an international level, the usual point of reference for Spain during the 18th century is the wage series that Earl Hamilton compiled (and Robert Allen included in his database) using the payrolls from the construction...

This paper provides the first estimates of the number of days worked per year in the construction sector in Madrid between 1740 and 1810. Using a database of 389,000 observations with over 2.15 million paid days, we demonstrate how the length of the working year in the second half of eighteenth...

Children early in the birth order get more parental care than later children. Does this significantly affect their life chances? An extensive genealogy of 428,280 English people 1680-2024, with substantial sets of complete families, suggests that birth order had little effect on social outcomes...

This paper analyses social inequality in adult mortality over the last 500 years in rural Aragon (Spain). It uses individual-level microdata corresponding to more than 20,000 individuals whose socioeconomic status, age at death and other family, cultural and environmental variables are known....

We offer a new methodology for the construction of annual population stocks over the very long run. Our method does not require the assumption of a closed economy, and can be used in situations in which local annual gross flows are obtainable. Combining gross flows with intermittent census-type...

Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by Covid-19 induces to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health. The fourteenth-century Black Death, which is...

The "refugee gap" in the economic status of refugees relative to other migrants might be due to the experience of being a refugee, or to government policy, which often denies the right to work during lengthy application processes. In Denmark before the Second World War, however, refugees were...

In this paper we provide an economic interpretation of intercropping as a risk management strategy based on spatial diversification of production. We study vine intercropping - i.e., scattering vines across fields rather than concentrating them in specialized vineyards - a traditional practice...

The quality of age reporting in Ireland worsened in the years after the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852), even as other measures of educational attainment improved. We show how demography partly accounts for this seemingly conflicting pattern. Specifically, we argue that a greater propensity to...

This article leverages uniquely abundant town-level data to examine spatial inequality in prices and wages during the First Globalisation. I build a new dataset on prices of traded and household goods, and wages of skilled and unskilled workers for a panel of 42 towns in Serbia, in the period...