Global Prices and Incomes 1200-1950, Stage 4

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides continued funding for an innovative effort to gather data about prices and incomes for many goods across many countries and across a very long time span. The PIs and their collaborators in the US work with a global group of scholars to assemble data on the prices of staple goods and on the distribution of income. They make extensive searches of a variety of archival data sources to assemble this information. The result is publicly available data that can be used to make comparsions about per capita incomes and living standards across time and across distance. The PIs will continue previous effort with expanded data collection in China, Russia and Latin America. They will collect a new fiscal history data set that will compare certain indicators of government revenues and expenditures over the past centuries. The PIs plan research into whether relative prices are a cause of class-specific lifestyles and the structural determinants of fiscal capacity and fiscal choice. The PIs will also add this historical data to the Penn World Tables, which provide similar data for the period since 1950. Broader impacts include training both undergraduate and graduate students in the necessary research methods. The data are also useful for policy makers who want to understand the historic roots of modern economic systems.