RT Generic
T1 The role of human capital in pre-industrial societies: Skills and earnings in eighteenth-century Castile (Spain)
A1 Álvarez, Begoña
A1 Ramos Palencia, Fernando
K1 human capital, pre-industrial Spain, skill premia, earnings inequality, quantile regression
AB Using the Ensenada Cadastre, a unique database on Castilian households circa 1750, wemeasure the effect of human capital on the structure of male labor earnings. Human capitalis proxied by individual indicators of basic skills (literacy and numeracy) and ofoccupational skills. We employ a Mincerian regression approach and find that, on average,workers with greater skills earned more than otherwise similar workers with lesser skills.This finding is robust to the inclusion of additional controls for age, householdcomposition, job characteristics, and place of residence. Estimated returns were larger forurban than for rural workers and were strongly heterogeneous across activity sectors. Therichness of our data set reveals that higher-skilled workers not only reaped positive rewardsin their main jobs but also were more likely to diversify and increase their earnings through¿by-employment¿. However, not all workers benefited to the same degree from increasedhuman capital. Quantile regression analysis shows that earnings disparities between workerswith different skills were much smaller at the lower than at the upper end of the earningsdistribution. This evidence indicates that, in pre-industrial Castile, human capitalcontributed to earnings (and income) inequality.
YR 2016
FD 2016-07
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10433/4193
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10433/4193
LA en
NO REPEC_wphaei
DS RIO
RD May 24, 2026