Labour and Wages in Pre-Industrial Catalonia

Natalia Mora Sitja
Additional contact information
Natalia Mora Sitja: formerly of Keble College, Oxford

No _045, Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper examines labour’s organisation and labour’s reward in Catalonia before the first Industrial Revolution. Using new quantitative evidence on urban wages, it first shows that agricultural and urban real wages did not decrease during the last five decades of the pre-industrial period, despite increasing commodity prices. Secondly, it performs an econometric test that shows that wage responses reflected a condition of labour market integration, with occupational and spatial mobility. New data on the characteristics of immigration in Barcelona have been assembled to reinforce previous findings, and to provide new information on the push factors that inclined labourers to migrate. The paper’s aim is both to test issues long discussed in the literature on labour markets (taking Catalonia as the case study), and to provide new data that may help future research.

Date: 2002-05-01
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/Economics/History/paper45/45paper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_045

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Maxine Collett ().