Building Workers in Madrid (1737-1805). New Wage Series and Working Lives

Mario García-Zúñiga and Ernesto López-Losa
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Mario García-Zúñiga: University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
Ernesto López-Losa: University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ernesto López Losa

No 152, Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES)

Abstract: This paper provides new series of building wages for 18th-century Madrid. At an international level, the usual point of reference for Spain during the 18th century is the wage series that Earl Hamilton compiled (and Robert Allen included in his database) using the payrolls from the construction of the Royal Palace of Madrid. However, Hamilton did not fully exploit the rich information that those data provide about wage rates, skills and labour force participation. Contrary to the simplicity of the labour categories in Hamilton’s series, our results show the existence of a complex world of skills and, consequently, of wage rates that only come to the surface when we reconstruct the working lives of the thousands of workers who participated in the building of the new palace. The new data presented in this paper provide some new insights into the functioning of labour markets and the complexity of wage (and even human capital) formation in pre-industrial Madrid.

Keywords: Spain; building wages; pre-industrial labour market; 18th century; construction history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 J49 N33 N63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-lma
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hes:wpaper:0152

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