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...

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...

Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually comes in the shape of social tables: inventories of a range of social groups and their mean incomes. These are frequently reported without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in...

This paper presents a new method for calculating Gini coefficients from tabulations of the mean income of social classes. Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually come in the form of such tabulations, called social tables. Inequality indices generated from social...

This article studies the accumulation and intergenerational transmission of wealth in early-modern Ottoman Anatolia by employing data from probate estate inventories (terekes) as found in the court records (sicils) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting...

This paper analyses and compares the first and the second program of burden sharing (Lastenausgleich): which were enacted after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany 1948/49, and after the reunification of Germany 1990, respectively. The first program of burden sharing, firstly, aimed...

There have been important studies of overall income inequality and of poverty in South Africa. In this paper, we approach the subject from a different direction: the extent and evolution of top incomes. We present estimates of the shares in total income of groups such as the top 1 per cent and...

This paper develops a methodology to estimate the entire population distributions from bin-aggregated sample data. We do this through the estimation of the parameters of mixtures of distributions that allow for maximal parametric flexibility. The statistical approach we develop enables...

This paper investigates possible explanations for the increases in inequality observed in Brazil during the 1980s. While the static decompositions of inequality by household characteristics reveal that education and race of the household head, as well as geographic location, can account for a...

This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally...