RT Generic
T1 Comparing Income and Wealth Inequality in Pre-Industrial economies. Lessons from Spain in the 18th century
A1 Nicolini, Esteban
A1 Ramos Palencia, Fernando
K1 inequality, income, wealth, Spain, probate inventories, Ensenada Cadastre.
AB Research on the history of inequality in pre-industrial economies has focusedmainly on either wealth or income inequality. The most common problem with wealthinequality is the lack information about the bottom of the distribution while the mainproblem with income inequality is the lack of data to characterize the top of thedistribution. Given that in general these approaches are based in different kinds ofsources and methodologies, the results are not easy to compare and the links betweenthe two distributions are difficult to establish. In this paper we use a unique data setfor different regions of Spain circa 1750 and present results (the first for any pre-20thcentury economy) of inequality of both income and wealth for the same sample ofhouseholds. Information of wealth comes from probate inventories while informationof income comes from the Ensenada Cadastre. The main results of the paper are thatpoor households are not completely absent from our data set of inventories, that theposition of a household in the distribution of income is closely associated to itsposition in the distribution of wealth and that an increase of a household¿s wealth isassociated to a less-than-proportional increase in the household¿s income.
YR 2016
FD 2016-05
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10433/4191
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10433/4191
LA en
NO Área de Historia e Instituciones Económicas, UPO
DS RIO
RD May 23, 2026