Land inequality and numeracy in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth century

Abstract

We assess the relationship between land inequality and human capital at the end of the early modern period, focusing on individual-level evidence from Spain. Our main finding is that land inequality had already had a significant negative effect on the formation of human capital there in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We argue that this reflects the important role of a social structure based on farming families (as opposed to latifundia and day laborers) in the development of numeracy. This is consistent with earlier studies, which argued that farming households could (1) maintain a relatively favourable nutritional standard as a precondition for cognitive skills, (2) limit child labour and (3) encourage numeracy due to its demand by farming activities. Our results are robust, as they include several control variables and potential confounding variables.