New Lessons from Historical Labor Markets: Using a unique Danish data source to answer key questions in economics

Deposited in connection with an article published in the European Review of Economic History: <b>To the Manor Born: A New Microlevel Wage Database for Eighteenth Century Denmark<br><br>Abstract: </b>We document and make available to the scholarly community a uniquely detailed database of 20,680 observations of wages for men, women and children, and 30,000 observations of prices from eighteenth century rural Denmark. To illustrate the usefulness of such data, we provide three applications. First, we construct nominal wages and deflate them using Allen’s constant consumer baskets. Real wages exhibit a fall with the introduction of serfdom, and other changes consistent with known historical events. Second, we consider skill premia, finding no secular trends between skill categories, but considerable variation both within and between categories over time, suggesting that estimates based on simple averages should be interpreted with caution. Lastly, we consider Denmark’s position in a “rural” Little Divergence debate by comparing with other European countries for which there are rural wages. The Danish rural economy was unsurprisingly relatively poor during this period, although there was considerable variation between regions.