Historical social tables: advantages, methodology, and problems

Philipp Erfurth, María Gómez León, Giacomo Gabbuti and Branko Milanovic

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper provides a methodological contribution to the study of historical income inequality by examining the construction and use of social tables for the nineteenth century. In a period when modern household surveys were absent, social tables represent one of the only feasible approaches for providing distributional evidence for the entire population. At the same time, existing studies rely on a wide range of assumptions, classifications, and data treatments, which makes comparisons across countries and over time difficult. The paper reviews the main methodological challenges involved in constructing social tables, including class definitions, within group inequality, units of analysis, and the external validation of income levels and subsistence benchmarks. Using simulations and historical examples, it shows how alternative methodological choices can generate substantial differences in inequality estimates. It finally proposes a set of guiding principles and template structures aimed at improving comparability, while still preserving the country-specific nature of historical evidence.

JEL-codes: J1 N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2026-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/137134/ Open access version. (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:137134

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().