Skills and human capital in eighteenth‐century Spain: wages and working lives in the construction of the Royal Palace of Madrid (1737–1805)^†

Abstract

Using a database of about 375,000 individual observations, which represent over two million days worked, this article studies building workers’ remunerations and how labour markets functioned in eighteenth‐century Madrid. We present new wage series that correct and improve the evidence existing in the literature and provide an explanation for the long‐run wage stickiness found in the city. Economic factors, rather than customs or guild regulations, explain why wage rates remained unaltered for about 100 years. The reconstruction of the working lives of 100 of the workers who took part in the construction of the Royal Palace of Madrid provides the first evidence of wage profiles for pre‐industrial times. They demonstrate that every wage rate was attached to a certain level of skill. Craftsmen's wages increased as they gained abilities, as human capital theory predicts, while returns to age or experience were negligible in the case of unskilled workers. This points to the existence of segmented labour markets in the building sector in early modern Spain.

NURSING BABIES TO FIGHT POVERTY: WAGES OF WET NURSES OF SPANISH FOUNDLING HOSPITALS IN THE 18THAND 19THCENTURIES

“…One of the problems of working with wages is not knowing whether the given occupation remained the same over time. This problem affects, for example, the wages of construction workers (Allen 2001; Ericsson and Mölinder 2020; García Zúñiga and López Losa 2021). In our case, the job being remunerated was always the same—rearing a child, which included feeding, clothing, cleaning and generally caring for the child.…”

“…To learn the income of peasants in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, we already have numerous studies on agricultural day wages. With respect to non-agricultural day wages, most of the available series are for construction workers (Hamilton 1988; Reher and Ballesteros 1993; Lanza García 1998; Andrés Ucendo and Lanza García 2014, 2020; García-Zúñiga and López Losa 2021; López-Losa and Piquero Zarauz 2021). There are also studies of the service sector, including workers in municipal services (Reher and Ballesteros 1993), and charitable institutions (Llopis Agelán and García Montero 2011).…”

“… 18 Llopis Agelán and García Montero (2011), López Losa and Piquero Zarauz (2016), García-Zúñiga and López Losa (2021), Pérez Romero (2019), Andrés Ucendo and Lanza García (2020). …”

Productividad del trabajo, salarios por pieza y beneficios en la manufactura preindustrial. La pañería de Alcoi (1585-1810)

“…El texto se divide en cuatro partes claramente diferenciadas. En la Montero, 2011;Humphries, 2013;López Losa, 2013;Andrés y Lanza, 2014González-Mariscal, 2015;Horrell et al, 2015;Humphries y Weisdorf, 2015, 2016de Pleijt y van Zanden, 2016, 2021Calderón et al, 2017;López Losa y Piquero, 2018;Stephenson, 2018Stephenson, , 2019Stephenson, , 2020Humphries y Schneider, 2019a, 2019bPérez Romero, 2019;Rota y J. Weisdorf, 2019;García-Zúñiga, 2020;García-Zúñiga y López Losa, 2021).…”

The Evolution of Wages in Early Modern Normandy (1600–1850)

“…wage hypothesis, put forward by Allen ( , 2015, by building new wage-series for casual unskilled labour and skilled labour in the construction sector for various European cities (e.g. Gará-Zúñiga and Lòpez Losa 2021;Rota and Weisdorf 2020;Stephenson 2018). Gary and Olsson (2020), and Rota and Weisdorf (2021) instead address this question by building wage-series based on payments made to labourers with fixed annual contracts in the countryside.…”