Children's wages Britain 1280 1860
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Sara Horrell, University of Cambridge UK; Jane Humphries, University of Oxford
Version: View help for Version V1
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Project Citation:
Project Description
University of Cambridge and University of Oxford
14th April 2019
Data used for ‘Children’s work and wages in Britain, 1280-1860’, Explorations in Economic History
3873 observations of children’s work and wages were collected from nearly 200 different sources to construct a series of children’s wages over the long run. The sources and the methods used to ensure a comparable dataset are detailed in the accompanying article. In brief, details on each child (sex, age, whether they worked alongside an adult), the type of work (job, occupation, sector), the remuneration (pay in cash and payment period, receipt of in kind benefits: board, lodging, clothing), year and county in which the child was observed, and details of the data source (primary, secondary; purpose for which data was originally recorded – household account, census of the poor, manorial account etc) were used to construct the initial dataset. Consistent variables were then created to reflect real reward to a day of work (payment in cash per day worked with the addition of perquisites, typically awarded for a full year but allocated pro-rata onto days of work) measured in terms of R.C. Allen’s respectability basket, and the standard of living per day in the year (cash payment for a year with the addition of a year’s worth of perquisites where applicable) relative to the cost of the Allen basket for 365 days. Initially these measures assume a constant 250 days worked in a year, but we also look at these measures under a variable working year assumption. The paper details our findings.
Dataset: childwagedatadeposit.sav
SPSS file, Report generates a codebook for the file
Additional information: Data sources. Document detailing where the original data can be located. Linked to ‘source’ variable in the dataset.
Scope of Project
Methodology
Related Publications
Published Versions
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