@techreport{Modalsli2011Inequality,
abstract = {Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually comes in the shape of social tables: inventories of a range of social groups and their mean incomes. These are frequently reported without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in the reporting of pre-industrial inequality. This paper suggests a correction method, and applies it to an existing collection of twenty-five social tables, from Rome in AD 1 to India in 1947. The corrections, using a variety of assumptions on within-group dispersion, lead to substantial increases in the Gini coeffcients. Combining the inequality levels with data on GDP, a robust positive relationship between income inequality and economic growth is confirmed. This supports earlier proposals, based on fewer data points, of a 'super Kuznets curve' of increasing inequality over the entire pre-industrial period.},
address = {Oslo},
author = {J\o{}rgen Heib\o{} Modalsli},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {D31; N30; O11; C65; 330; Pre-industrial inequality; social tables; Kuznets curve; history},
language = {eng},
number = {2011,11},
publisher = {Dep. of Economics, Univ. of Oslo},
title = {Inequality and growth in the very long run: Inferring inequality from data on social groups},
type = {Memorandum // Department of Economics, University of Oslo},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/47275},
year = {2011}
}
