Unreal Wages? A New Empirical Foundation for the Study of Living Standards and Economic Growth in England, 1260-1860

Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf

No _147, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Existing measures of historical real wages suffer from the fundamental problem that workers’annual incomes are estimated on the basis of day wages without knowingthelength ofthe working year. We circumvent this problem by presenting a novel wage series of male workersemployed on annual contracts. We use evidence of labour market arbitrage to argue that existing real wage estimates are badly off target, because they overestimate the medieval working year but underestimate the industrial one. Our data suggests that modern economic growth began two centuries earlier than hitherto thought and was driven by an ‘Industrious Revolution’.

Keywords: England; industrial revolution; industrious revolution; labour input; living standards; wages; Malthusian model. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 J4 J5 J6 J7 J8 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-knm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Working Paper: Unreal Wages? A New Empirical Foundation for the Study of Living Standards and Economic Growth in England, 1260‐1860 (2016)
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