Relative costs of living, for richer and poorer, 1688–1914

Transportation cost reducing technological change and wages inequalities

“…The cost of services to the rich increased with wages of the unskilled. This created a dierent trend in terms of cost of living (the cost of living of the rich went up faster than that of the poor) (Homan et al, 2002;Geloso and Lindert, 2020). When adjusted for diering trends (i.e.…”

Inequality in Pre‐Industrial Europe (1260–1850): New Evidence From the Labor Share

“…The nominal labor share measures the percentage of the wage bill on total return to factors, while the real labor share is the percentage of the total purchasing power of the population which accrues to workers. The two measures diverge if the ratio P w / P y changes relative to the base year: ceteris paribus (i.e., for the same distribution of nominal income) an increase in the prices of wage goods lowers the workers’ share on the total potential consumption—i.e., increases real inequality (Crafts, 2020; Geloso and Lindert, 2020). In this perspective, our framework is consistent with the suggestion to use group‐specific price indexes to deflate nominal income for estimating trends in inequality (Hoffman et al ., 2002).…”

Globalization and Empire: Market Integration and International Trade among Canada, the US, and Britain, 1750–1870

“…Our data for the US and the UK are those used by Sharp and Weisdorf (2013). 14 The price data for Canada are assembled using a combination of recent (Geloso 2019; Geloso and Lindert 2020) and old (Dechêne 1994; Ouellet et al 1982; McCalla 1993) price evidence regarding Québec City, Montreal and Central Ontario (for which we provide more details in Online Appendix ) 15 . All prices have been converted to shillings and volumes have been converted to quarters.…”