On Historical Household Budgets

Brian A'Hearn, Nicola Amendola and Giovanni Vecchi

No _144, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected. And statistical techniques have been developed to handle the associated problems of small, incomplete, and unrepresentative samples. We introduce the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, aimed at gathering data and sources, but also at creating an informational infrastructure that provides i) reliable storage and easy access to historical family budget data, along with ii) tools to configure the data as it is entered so as to harmonise it with present-day surveys.

Keywords: household budgets; household budget surveys; living standards; inequality; poverty; survey; globalization; purchasing power parities; grouped data; poststratification. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C83 D60 D63 I31 I32 N30 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0c2f2e59-b688-4226-9c79-0a447ca59fbd (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: On Historical Household Budgets (2016)
Working Paper: On Historical Household Budgets (2016)
Working Paper: On Historical Household Budgets (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:esohwp:_144

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).