Labor income inequality in pre-industrial Mediterranean Spain: The city of Murcia in the 18th century

José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez, Salvador Gil-Guirado, W. Daniel Giraldo-Paez and Chris Vickers

Explorations in Economic History, 2019, vol. 73, issue C, -

Abstract: Information about the income distribution in pre-industrial societies is sparse. We analyze labor income inequality in 18th century Murcia, a city in Mediterranean Spain. The historical income distribution of this region is relatively unknown, despite it having on of the highest urbanization rates in Europe in the pre-industrial era. We first use a census conducted in the 1750s which collected information on income and occupation. We then use this income information to conduct analyses of the income distribution in the 1730s and 1780s using censuses with information about the occupational distribution. We find large changes in the distribution of occupations across the censuses. We show that our results on inequality are sensitive to assumptions regarding household composition and within-occupation distribution of income, but not to the definition of household income.

Keywords: Income inequality; Spain; Murcia; Pre-industrial economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J31 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498318302092
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:exehis:v:73:y:2019:i:c:1

DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2019.05.002

Access Statistics for this article

Explorations in Economic History is currently edited by R.H. Steckel

More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().