Working papers
 

Links and abstracts for these working papers appear below, after the initial list. All working papers are in PDF format. If you do not have Adobe Reader, click here.

GPIH Working Paper No. 1. Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738-1925.

GPIH Working Paper No. 2, Jean-Pascal Bassino and Debin Ma, Japanese Unskilled Wages in International Perspective, 1741-1913.

GPIH Working Paper No. 3, Phillip Hoffman, Why Is It That Europeans Ended Up Conquering the Rest of the Globe? Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe’s Comparative Advantage in Violence

GPIH Working Paper No. 4, Kyoji Fukao, Debin Ma, and Tangjun Yuan. Real GDP in Pre-War East Asia: A 1934-36 Benchmark Purchasing Power Parity Comparison with the U.S.

GPIH Working Paper No. 5, Gregory Clark and David Jacks. Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1869

GPIH Working Paper No. 6, Peter H. Lindert. Long-run Trends in American Farmland Values.

GPIH Working Paper No. 7, Robert C. Allen. How Prosperous were the Romans? Evidence from Diocletian's Price Edict (301 AD).

GPIH Working Paper No. 8, Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Measuring Ancient Inequality, ow published as Milanovic, Branko, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Pre-Industrial Inequality”. Economic Journal 121 (March 2011): 255–272.

GPIH Working Paper No. 9, Gregory Clark. The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1209-2004.

GPIH Working Paper No. 10, Metin M. Cosgel. Agricultural Productivity in the Early Ottoman Empire.

GPIH Working Paper No. 11, Se Yan. Real Wages and Skill Premia in China, 1858-1936 Evidence from the China Maritime Customs Archives.

GPIH Working Paper No. 12, A. Leticia Arroyo Abad. Inequality in Republican Latin America: Assessing the Impact of Factor Endowments and Trade.

GPIH Working Paper No. 13, Philip T. Hoffman. The Politics and Economics of Europe’s Comparative Advantage in Violence.

GPIH Working Paper No. 14, Robert Allen, Tommy Murphy, and Eric Schneider. The Colonial Origins of Divergence in the Americas: a Labour Market Approach

GPIH Working Paper No. 15, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson. American Incomes Before and After the Revolution.

GPIH Working Paper No. 16, Leticia Arroyo Abad, Elwyn Davies, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. Between Conquest and Independence: Real wages and demographic change in Spanish Latin America, 1530-1820

GPIH Working Paper No. 17, César Yáñez, Rodrigo Rivero, Marc Badia-Miró, and Anna Carreras-Marín. The Population of Latin America from the Nineteenth Century to 2008

GPIH Working Paper No. 18, Mark Dincecco and Gabriel Katz. State Capacity and Long-Run Economic Performance

GPIH Working Paper No. 19. Leticia Arroyo Abad and Peter Lindert. Fiscal Redistribution in Latin America since the Nineteenth Century

GPIH Working Paper No. 1, Version: October 2005

Abstract
The paper develops data on the history of wages and prices in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. These data are used to compare Beijing and Canton to leading cities in Europe and Japan in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe and far behind that of workers in the leading economies in northwestern Europe. Industrialization led to rising real wages in Europe and Japan. Real wages declined in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth. There was little cumulative change in the standard of living of workers in Beijing and Canton for two hundred years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long run stagnation in China combined with economic development in Japan and Europe.

GPIH Working Paper No. 2, Version: November 2005. Forthcoming in Research in Economic History, 2005

Abstract
Constructing consumption baskets for the benchmark periods of 1745-54 and 1882-86, and price indices, we calculate real wage series for Japanese unskilled daily laborers in 1741-1913. Matching caloric and protein contents in our Japanese consumption baskets with those in European baskets, we compare Japanese and European urban real wages. Real wage rates in Kyoto and later Tokyo are about a third London wages but comparable to wages in major Southern and Central European cities for the 1700-1900; second, there is a substantial surge in real wages in the Meiji period over that of the Tokugawa period. These findings have implications for the debate on conditions in Europe and Asia on the eve of the
industrial revolution .

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 3, Version: January 2006.

Abstract
Preliminary data from England, France, and Germany show that the relative price of artillery, handguns, and gunpowder declined between the fourteenth century and the eighteenth century. Most of these prices fell relative to the cost of factors of production, and the price decline suggests that the military sector of western European economies experienced rapid and sustained technical change before the Industrial Revolution–a claim in accord with qualitative evidence from research on the late medieval and early modern military revolution. The price data shed new light on this revolution and point to a potential explanation for why western Europe developed a comparative advantage in violence over the rest of the world.

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 4, Version: February 2007.

Abstract
This article provides estimates of purchasing power parity (PPP) converters for expenditure side GDP of Japan/China, Japan/U.S and China/US through a detailed matching of prices for more than 50 types of goods and services in private consumption and about 20 items or sectors for investment and government expenditure. Linking with the earlier studies on the price levels of Taiwan and Korea relative to Japan, we derive the mid-1930s benchmark PPP adjusted per capita income of Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea at 32%, 11%, 23%, and 12% of the U.S. level respectively. These estimates corrected the consistent downward bias in East Asian income levels based on market exchange rate conversions. Compared with Angus Maddison’s estimates based on the 1990 benchmark back-projection, our current-price based result are 18% and 44% lower for Japan and Korea and 4% and 10% higher for Taiwan and China respectively in the mid-1930s. We develop a preliminary theoretical and empirical framework to examine the possible source of the biases in the back-projection method. The article ends with a discussion on historical implications of our findings on the initial conditions and long-term growth dynamics in East Asia

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 5, Version: April 2006, published in European Review of Economic History 11, 1 (April 2007): 39-72.

Abstract
How important was coal to the Industrial Revolution? Despite the huge growth of output, and the grip of coal and steam on the popular image of the Industrial Revolution, recent cliometric accounts have assumed coal mining mattered little to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast both E. A. Wrigley and Kenneth Pomeranz have made coal central to the story. This paper constructs new series on coal rents, the price of coal at pithead and at market, and the price of firewood, and uses them to examine this issue. We conclude coal output expanded in the Industrial Revolution mainly as a result of increased demand rather than technological innovations in mining. But that expansion could have occurred at any time before 1760. Further our coal rents series suggests that English possession of coal reserves made a negligible contribution to Industrial Revolution incomes.

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 6, Version: February 1988, published in Agricultural History Center Working Papers Series no.45, and published under the same title in Agricultural History 62(3) (Summer 1988)

Abstract
The long history of U.S. farmland prices shows some striking reversals, with the latest being the worst. The boom and bust cycle since 1973 has been as unstable as any earlier era of ten years or more. Its land-value instability matches that of the Civil War disruption, and is far worse than those in either the famous speculative cycle peaking in 1920 or the Great Depression of the 1930s. The interwar movements in fact reveal a single long downward slide in real land farmland values from 1914 to 1942, not the popular alternation of booms and busts. Each of these conclusions is supported by the twentieth-century behavior of rents and the ex-post rate of return on farm land, as well as by the movements in its purchase value.

These movements were "real" in every sense. They showed up in real, not just nominal, values. They were genuine price movements, not movements in the quality of land. And they were shared by all the regions of the United States, despite a few interesting regional variations.

The trends throw new light on two issues in the history of American capital accumulation. Incorporating market-perceived capital gains and losses on farm land into measures of savings starts to re-shape the contours of the famous rise and fall of American savings. The attractions of farm land as an asset may also help explain the lower capital intensity of the American than the British economy in the middle of the last century.

A final section of the paper makes initial progress toward explaining the striking movements in farmland values and rents since the early nineteenth century. It explores the roles of several forces, finding a general pattern: those changes that historically raised the price of farm land were, with only one exception, changes that must have harmed the advance of wages and average national income.

GPIH Working Paper No. 7, Version: September 2007. Oxford University, Department of Economics Working Paper no. 363 (September 2007).

Abstract
The paper compares the standard of living of labourers in the Roman Empire in 301 AD with the standard of living of labourers in Europe and Asia from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. Roman data are drawn from Diocletian’s Price Edict. The real wage of Roman workers was like that of their counterparts in the lagging parts of Europe and much of Asia in the middle of the eighteenth century. Roman workers earned just enough to buy a minimal subsistence consumption basket. Real wages were considerably higher in the advanced parts of Europe in the eighteenth century, as they had been in Europe generally following the Black Death in 1348-9.

GPIH Working Paper No. 8, Version: November 2007. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 13550 (November 2007), published as "Pre-Industrial Inequality", Economic Journal 121 (March 2011): 255-272.

[See also its appendix data files downloadable here at GPIH website, in the “early income distributions” page.]

Abstract
Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using what are known as social tables, stretching from the Roman Empire 14 AD, to Byzantium in 1000, to England in 1688, to Nueva España around 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two new concepts in making those assessments -- what we call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of actual inequality, we compare the latter with the maximum feasible inequality (or surplus) that could have been extracted by the elite. The results, especially when compared with modern poor countries, give new insights in to the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.

GPIH Working Paper No. 9, Version: December 2005, published in Journal of Political Economy 113, 6 (December 2005): 1307-1340.

Abstract
Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using what are known as social tables, stretching from the Roman Empire 14 AD, to Byzantium in 1000, to England in 1688, to Nueva España around 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two new concepts in making those assessments -- what we call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of actual inequality, we compare the latter with the maximum feasible inequality (or surplus) that could have been extracted by the elite. The results, especially when compared with modern poor countries, give new insights in to the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.

GPIH Working Paper No. 10, Version: October 2005.

Abstract
This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I use data from the tax registers of the Ottoman Empire to estimate grain output per worker, standardized (in bushels of wheat equivalent) to allow productivity comparisons within these regions and with other times and places. The results suggest that Ottoman agriculture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had achieved levels of labor productivity that compared favorably even with most European countries circa 1850.

  • Se Yan. Real Wages and Skill Premia in China, 1858-1936 Evidence from the China Maritime Customs Archives.

GPIH Working Paper No. 11, Version: March 2008.

Abstract
What happens to real wages and wage inequality when a country opens to trade and industrialization? I construct new wage series for China from 1858 to 1936. I collect the nominal wages from the records of the China Maritime Customs, and estimate real wages for unskilled and skilled workers using new group-specific cost of living indices. I find that real wages of the unskilled were stagnant throughout the period, likely because of China’s large stock of unskilled labor. Skilled wages rose rapidly between 1858 and 1920 and fell thereafter. My findings suggest that technological advances increased skill demand, driving up the skill premium. Educational progress eventually increased the supply of skilled workers, thereby reducing the skilled wage. This pattern is consistent with the story of “race between technology and education”.

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 12, Version: November 2008. Forthcoming inthe Journal of Economic History.

Abstract
Using a new dataset, this paper presents new evidence on inequality in Latin America for the 19th century and studies the e ects of factor endowments and trade on inequality. Recent research has highlighted the link between the colonial origins of inequality and its persistence in Latin America. We nd that inequality varied substantially throughout the century and across the region. We identify and quantify the impact of changing factor endowments and trade on inequality using a theoretical model of intertemporal inequality transmission based on asset ownership in an open economy subject to shocks. The results indicate that inequality in the Southern Cone rose during the era of globalization while it decreased in Mexico and Venezuela. The rise in inequality in Argentina and Uruguay is explained by the impact of favorable terms of trade and international migration; however, the e ect was dampened by signi cant land annexation. On the other hand, the decline in Mexican and Venezuelan inequality is related to decreasing terms of trade ampli ed by the expansion of available arable land.

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 13, Version: December 2008.

Abstract
By the eighteenth century, Europeans dominated the military technology of gunpowder weapons. Their dominance was surprising, because the technology had originated in China and had been used with expertise in East and South Asia and the Ottoman Empire. Historians have often invoked competition to account for the Europeans’ military prowess, but competition cannot explain why they forged ahead in developing this technology. The answer lies in the peculiar form that military competition took in western Europe: it was a tournament that induced European rulers to invest heavily in improving the technology of gunpowder weapons. Political incentives and military conditions kept such a tournament from developing in China, Japan, India, and the Ottoman Empire, and as a result rulers had much less reason to push the gunpowder technology.

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 14, Version: July 2011.

Abstract
Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American continents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities. From secondary sources we collected price data that - with diverse degrees of quality- covers various years between colonization and indenpendence and, following the methodology now familiar in the literature, we built estimations of price indexes for Boston, Philadelphia, and the Chesapeake Bay region in North America and Bogota, Mexico, and Potosi in Latin America exploring alternative assumptions on the characteristics of the reference basket.

GPIH Working Paper No. 15, Version: July 2011.

Abstract
Building social tables in the tradition of Gregory King, we quantify the level and inequality of American
incomes before and after the Revolutionary War. Our tentative estimates suggest that between 1774
and 1800 American incomes fell in real per capita terms. The colonial South was richer, and then
suffered a greater Revolutionary decline, than suggested by previous estimates. Any rapid growth
after 1790 seems to have just partially offset part of a very steep wartime decline. We also find that
free American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales.
Indeed, New England and the Middle Colonies appear to have been more egalitarian than anywhere
else in the measurable world. The colonists also had greater purchasing power than their English counterparts
over all of the income ranks except in the top few percent.

Abstract
On the basis of a newly constructed dataset, this paper presents long-term series of the price levels, nominal wages, and real wages in Spanish Latin America – more specifically in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina – between ca. 1530 and ca. 1820. It synthesizes the work of scholars who have collected and published data on individual cities and periods, and presents comparable indices of real wages and prices in the colonial period that give a reasonable guide to trends in the long run. We show that nominal wages and prices were on average much higher than in Western Europe or in Asia, a reflection of the low value of silver that must have had consequences for competitiveness of the Latin American economies. Labour scarcity was the second salient feature of Spanish Latin America and resulted in real wages much above subsistence and in some cases (Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina) comparable to levels in Northwestern Europe. For Mexico, this was caused by the dramatic decline of the population after the Conquest. For Bolivia, the driving force was the boom in silver mining in Potosi that created a huge demand for labour. In the case of Argentina, low population density was a pre-colonial feature. Perhaps due to a different pattern of depopulation, the real wages of other regions (Peru, Colombia and Chile) were much lower, and only increased above subsistence during the first half of the 18th century. These results are consistent with independent evidence on biological standards of living and with estimates of GDP per capita at the beginning of the 19th century.

 

Abstract
The analysis of population levels in Latin America plays an important role in the regional historiography. The estimated series appeared until now offers huge discrepancies, therefore, we believe essential to provide homogeneous series for the 19th and the 20th centuries. In our work we shed new light on this issue, from an exhaustive study of the existing Latin American historical sources for the region. To do that, we offer series of population for 21 countries of Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela) from own sources (Population Census), and other demographic complementary works. From all the wide range of existing databases (Mitchell, Maddison, MOXLAD and ECLAC), the authors have chosen to base its reconstruction of the data, on the series offered by ECLAC, which derive from the work of CELADE. Along with a detailed explanation of the data collection, we also provide an analysis of the discrepancies and the accuracy of sources. It concludes with an appendix with the data series.

 

GPIH Working Paper No. 18, Version: September 2013

Abstract
We present new evidence about the long-run relationship between state capacity and economic performance in Europe, the birthplace of modern economic growth. Our database is novel and spans 11 countries and 4 centuries from the Old Regime to World War I. We argue that national governments undertook two political transformations over this period: fiscal centralization and limited government. We find a significant direct relationship between fiscal centralization and economic growth. Furthermore, we find that an increase in the state's capacity to extract greater tax revenues was one mechanism through which both fiscal centralization and, to some extent, limited government played significant economic roles. We believe that our analysis is among the first to show systematic evidence that state capacity is an important determinant of long-run economic growth.

 

Leticia Arroyo Abad and Peter Lindert. Fiscal Redistribution in Latin America since the Nineteenth Century

GPIH Working Paper No. 19, Version: January 2016

Abstract
This paper presents the first multi-country history of how Latin American government spending and taxes have reshaped the distribution of income in the long run. We combine our new historical time series for six countries with impressive recent studies of their fiscal redistribution patterns in the 21st century. The rising share of social spending has not been directed strongly toward the poor. The swings in fiscal redistribution in Chilean and Argentine history have been particularly dramatic. Latin America as a whole stands out as a region with a low rate of investment in education and infrastructure, redistributing away from future generations toward pensioners. Pension commitments have locked the region’s governments into prolonged pension deficits, a strong case of historical path dependence.