On Historical Household Budgets

Brian A`Hearn, Nicola Amendola and Giovanni Vecchi
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Brian A`Hearn: Pembroke College, University of Oxford

No 45, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected. And statistical techniques have been developed to handle the associated problems of small, incomplete, and unrepresentative samples. We introduce the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, aimed at gathering data and sources, but also at creating an informational infrastructure that provides i) reliable storage and easy access to historical family budget data, along with ii) tools to configure the data as it is entered so as to harmonize it with present-day surveys.

Keywords: Household budgets; household budget surveys; living standards; inequality; poverty; survey; globalization; purchasing power parities; grouped data; poststratification. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C83 D60 D63 I31 I32 N30 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_45_ahearn_amendola_vecchi.pdf (application/pdf)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2793438 First version, 2016 (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: On Historical Household Budgets (2016)
Working Paper: On Historical Household Budgets (2016)
Working Paper: On Historical Household Budgets (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:45

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2793438

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