The Use of Quantile Methods in Economic History

Damian Clarke, Manuel Llorca-Jaña () and Daniel Pailañir ()
Additional contact information
Manuel Llorca-Jaña: Universidad de Valparaíso
Daniel Pailañir: University of Chile

No 14659, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Quantile regression and quantile treatment effect methods are powerful econometric tools for considering economic impacts of events or variables of interest beyond the mean. The use of quantile methods allows for an examination of impacts of some independent variable over the entire distribution of continuous dependent variables. Measurement in many quantative settings in economic history have as a key input continuous outcome variables of interest. Among many other cases, human height and demographics, economic growth, earnings and wages, and crop production are generally recorded as continuous measures, and are collected and studied by economic historians. In this paper we describe and discuss the broad utility of quantile regression for use in research in economic history, review recent quantitive literature in the field, and provide an illustrative example of the use of these methods based on 20,000 records of human height measured across 50-plus years in the 19th and 20th centuries. We suggest that there is considerably more room in the literature on economic history to convincingly and productively apply quantile regression methods.

Keywords: quantile regression; quantile treatment effects; economic history; practitioners (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 C21 C22 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-isf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Historical Methods, 2023, 56 (2), 115-132

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14659.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The use of quantile methods in economic history (2023)
Working Paper: The Use of Quantile Methods in Economic History (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp14659

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().