Impact of Childcare and Eldercare on Off‐farm Activities in Rural China

Using individual data collected in rural China and adopting Heckman's two‐step function, we examined the impact of childcare and eldercare on laborers' off‐farm activities. Our study finds that having school‐aged children has a negative impact on rural laborers' migration decisions and a positive impact on their decision to work in the local off‐farm employment market. As grandparents can help to take care of young children, the impact of preschoolers is insignificant. Having elderly family to care for decreases the income earned by female members of the family. Although both men and women are actively engaged in off‐farm employment today in rural China, this study shows that women are still the primary care providers for both children and the elderly. Therefore, reforming public school enrollment and high school/college entrance examination systems so that migrant children can stay with their parents, this will help rural laborers to migrate to cities. The present study also calls for more public services for preschoolers and the elderly in rural China.     

British working‐class household composition,labour supply,and commercial leisure participation during the 1930s

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the ‘breadwinner–homemaker’ household, characterized by a high degree of intra‐household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working‐class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra‐household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working‐class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner–homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources—especially for individualized expenditures—in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour.     

Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre‐industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century

Research on economic inequality in early modern Europe is complicated by the lack of appropriate data for reconstructing income or wealth distributions. This article presents a study of income inequality in mid‐eighteenth‐century Old Castile (Spain) using the Ensenada Cadastre, a census conducted between 1749 and 1759. The article describes the information provided by this census and then discusses its advantages and disadvantages for reconstructing income profiles and calculating income inequality. This is followed by analysis of a dataset derived from the Cadastre that consists of more than 4,000 observations from Palencia (a province in northern Spain) and contains information on sources of household income, each household head's main occupation, residence location, and other household characteristics. Demographic data from this census is used to weight observations in the sample and thereby minimize selection bias. Findings show that inequality in eighteenth‐century Spain was probably substantial despite its relative backwardness; that the relationship between inequality and per capita income was not clear‐cut and was probably influenced by measurement of the higher incomes; and that although income inequality was largely driven by uneven land distribution, labour income also contributed to overall inequality—especially in urban centres.     

Liquidity Constraints and Postharvest Selling Behavior: Evidence from China's Maize Farmers

This paper addresses the impacts of liquidity constraints on household postharvest commodity selling behavior. Using data collected from China's maize farmers, we find that households with debt, in general, sell their maize much earlier than debt‐free households, thus potentially losing inter‐temporal arbitrage opportunities. Segmenting our sample into wealthy and poor households, we find that the relationship between a liquidity constraint and postharvest sales is apparent only among poor households. Using the occurrence of an illness in children or an elderly household member as an instrument for liquidity, we control for potential endogeneity associated with liquidity. We find that poor households in which there were children or elderly people with sicknesses in previous years are more likely to sell maize early than other poor households.     

Urban working‐class food consumption and nutrition in Britain in 1904

This article re‐examines the food consumption of working‐class households in 1904 and compares the nutritional content of these diets with modern measures of adequacy. We find a fairly steep gradient of nutritional attainment relative to economic class, with high levels of vitamin and mineral deficiency among the very poorest working households. However, we conclude that the average unskilled‐headed working household was better fed and nourished than previously thought. When proper allowance is made for the likely consumption of alcohol, household energy intakes were significantly higher still. We investigate the likely impact of contemporary cultural food distribution norms and conclude on the basis of the very limited evidence available that women may have received, on average, about 80 per cent of a man's share of the available food. We adjust energy requirements for likely higher physical activity rates and smaller stature and find that except among the poorest households, early twentieth‐century diets were sufficient to provide energy for reasonably physically demanding work. These results are consistent with recent attempts to relate the available anthropometric evidence to long‐run trends in food consumption. We also find that the lower tail of the household nutrition distribution drops away very rapidly, so that few households are estimated to have suffered severe food shortages.     

Selection and Reporting Bias in Household Surveys of Child Labor: Evidence from Tanzania

Abstract: Studies of child labor in developing countries have largely relied on data collected through national household surveys. But government‐sponsored household surveys are arguably prone to both sample selection bias and reporting bias. In this paper, we compare the demographic and labor market characteristics of working street children obtained from the 2000 Tanzanian Integrated Labor Force Survey, a government‐sponsored household survey, with the results obtained in a 2004 survey of working street children in the city of Mwanza in northern Tanzania. Our comparisons help illumine the potential biases introduced when child labor studies rely on household samples; specifically, we show that children in the non‐household based survey work longer hours, have lower educational attainment and suffer worse health outcomes than their counterparts in the government‐sponsored household survey. This suggests that studies based on national household surveys may significantly underestimate both the extent and the consequences of child labor.     

Fertility decline and the heights of children in Britain, 1886–1938

In this paper we argue that the fertility decline that began around 1880 had substantial positive effects on the health of children, as the quality–quantity trade-off would suggest. We use microdata from a unique survey from 1930s Britain to analyse the relationship at the household level between the standardised heights of children and the number of children in the family. Our results suggest that heights are influenced positively by family income per capita and negatively by the number of children or the degree of crowding in the household. The evidence suggests that family size affected the health of children through its influence on both nutrition and disease. Applying our results to long-term trends, we find that rising household income and falling family size contributed significantly to improving child health between 1886 and 1938. Between 1906 and 1938 these variables account for 40% of the increase in heights, and much of this effect is due to falling family size. We conclude that the fertility decline is a neglected source of the rapid improvement in health in the first half of the twentieth century.     

Did owner‐occupation lead to smaller families for interwar working‐class households?1

This article examines the links between working‐class home ownership and family limitation in interwar Britain. Purchasing a suburban house enabled families to buy into a new, aspirational model of working‐class respectability. Embracing this model entailed increased accommodation costs and higher levels of conspicuous consumption, placing great strains on many household budgets. Owner‐occupiers therefore sought to limit the size of their families in order to sustain their new lifestyles. Meanwhile the new suburban ideology strongly emphasized improved standards of childcare, based around creating a high‐quality domestic environment, and thus directly encouraged families to aim for fewer, but better‐resourced children.     

Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from China*

This paper examines the effect of parental, household and community character‐istics on the health of children in China. We find that birth order, death of elder siblings, use of prenatal care and alcohol consumption by the mother when pregnant have statistically significant effects on the health of children. Although parental education does not have a significant direct effect on child health, it does affect mothers’ behavior during pregnancy and inflfluences the use of health inputs, indirectly impacting the health of children. The research findings have important implications for both family planning programs and broader social policies in China.     

Real inequality in the early modern Low Countries: the city of ’s‐Hertogenbosch, 1500–1660

This article studies the welfare effects of economic growth in the early modern Low Countries. It applies the recently developed concept of ‘real inequality’ to a case study of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century ’s‐Hertogenbosch in the Southern Netherlands and demonstrates, by incorporating relative price movements, that specific (and in this case stagnant) nominal income inequality trajectories may disguise underlying shifts in real inequality that are influenced by socially biased relative prices. The analysis is then extended to include changes in demography and household size, which reveals a second important limitation in the study of long‐term economic inequality. In contrast to the stagnation and eventual decline in nominal inequality seen in ’s‐Hertogenbosch during the long sixteenth century (1500–1650), this broadened concept of ‘augmented’ real inequality in fact suggests the occurrence of a significant upturn during the first half of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, while nominal inequality had decreased, real inequality appears to have been higher by the middle of the seventeenth century than it had been around 1500. The study of global and/or long‐term inequality, in particular, would benefit greatly from a proper social, economic, and historical contextualization of these trends, not least in terms of the social biases in relative prices and household composition.     

Measles and the spatio‐temporal structure of modern Japan1

This article explores the spatio‐temporal structure of infectious diseases in modern Japan, using measles mortality data from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three aspects of the epidemiology of measles are discussed: the synchronization of epidemic waves, seasonality, and age at infection. These epidemiological analyses are connected to, respectively, regional integration, governmental policy on primary school education, and the number of young children in families. In addition, based on the fact that measles did not become endemic in early modern Edo (Tokyo), this article corrects epidemiologists' misunderstanding about the threshold of endemicity and argues that the critical population size varied substantially according to the societal factors of a given community. In so doing, this article suggests that historians can use measles data as a new biometric index for studying human health and socio‐economic conditions in societies of the past.     

Family structure, school attendance, and child labor in the American South in 1900 and 1910

Even in the early 20th century, black children were much more likely to be living apart from one or both parents than were white children. This paper examines the contribution of these racial differences in family structure to the racial differences in children’s experiences in the American South. Living apart from one or both parents was associated with lower school attendance and greater labor market participation, particularly for blacks. However, racial differences in adult literacy, household resources, and school characteristics were much more important for explaining the racial gaps in children’s activities than were racial differences in family structure.     

The rise and decline of European parliaments, 1188–17891

This article quantifies the activities of medieval and early modern parliaments. It traces the long‐term evolution of this European institution, and offers a first pass at analysing its impact on long‐term economic development. Starting in Spain in the twelfth century, parliaments gradually spread over the Latin west between 1200 and 1500. In the early modern period, parliaments declined in influence in southern and central Europe and further gained in importance in the Netherlands and Britain, resulting in an institutional ‘Little Divergence’ between 1500 and 1800. We discuss the background of this phenomenon in detail. Moreover, by analysing the effects of parliamentary activity on city growth we find that these differences in institutional development help to explain the economic divergence between north‐western and southern and central Europe.     

Matchmaking and moneymaking in a patronage society: the first duke and duchess of Chandos,c. 1712–351

The focus of this article is on the contribution of an early eighteenth‐century aristocratic marriage partnership to the family economy, and particularly to the non‐co‐resident, extended family. Through a study of the first duke and duchess of Chandos, the active involvement of a husband and wife in furthering the marriages of close kin is highlighted. By outlining the strategy and tactics adopted and discussing their motivation, the article challenges the view that kinship had seriously declined in importance by the early eighteenth century. The Brydgeses did more than broker marriages for close female relatives; they groomed the young women, helped build up and manage their portions using new and modern forms of making money such as investing in the stock market, and found them husbands. The marriages of these young women were a form of patronage. Motivation for this involvement included familial affection and responsibility but extended to increasing and consolidating the duke's socio‐political influence through the patronage system and to limiting the potential drain on his estate. The duchess had a vested interest in this: it raised her status within family, connection, and society. The young women concerned, and their parents, were not always grateful for this patronage.     

Wealth inequality in Sweden, 1750–1900†

This article examines the evolution of wealth inequality in Sweden from 1750 to 1900, contributing both to the debate on early modern and modern inequality and to the general debate on the pattern of inequality during industrialization. The pre‐industrial period (1750–1850) is for the first time examined for Sweden at the national level. The study uses a random sample of probate inventories from urban and rural areas across the country, adjusted for age and social class. Estimates are provided for the years 1750, 1800, 1850, and 1900. The results show a gradual growth in inequality as early as the mid‐eighteenth century, with the sharpest rise in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the early growth in inequality was connected to changes in the countryside and in agriculture, the later growth was related to industrialization encompassing both compositional effects and strong wealth accumulation among the richest. The level of inequality in Sweden in 1750 was lower than for other western European countries, but by 1900 Sweden was just as unequal.     

Gender,life cycle,and family ‘strategies’ among the poor: the Barcelona workhouse, 1762–1805

Poor relief has received less attention from historians of southern Europe compared with northern Europe. This article seeks to challenge the frequent assumption that the strength of family ties in southern Europe mitigated the need for welfare provision. It provides new data for men and boys entering the Barcelona workhouse in the period 1780–1803, and compares these with data from an earlier study of women and girls who entered the same institution over the period 1762–1805. We establish the characteristics of those who sought relief in terms of age, place of origin, marital status, and occupation. We use the information on reasons for entry and exit to ascertain family circumstances. We show that there were significant differences between males and females in terms of why they entered and left, and length of stay, particularly among the elderly. The bulk of the population of the workhouse, however, was comprised of children and adolescents. For this group, entry into the workhouse represented not just a temporary solution to life cycle poverty and periodic unemployment, but also a longer‐term strategy aimed at smoothing entry into the labour market.     

Pestilence,poverty, and provision: re‐evaluating the role of the popolani in early modern Venice

The labouring classes of early modern Venice, the popolani, made up nearly 90 per cent of the city's population. To this point the relevant historiography has focused almost exclusively on their professional and civic role. It is the core contention of this article that the contribution of the popolani to the Venetian economy and society far exceeded their documented professional and civic function. Using as a case study the homogeneous group of the shipbuilders and sailors of Venice and drawing on newly discovered primary sources from the Venetian State Archives, this article shows the distinct contributions of the popolani to the city's economy and society through their charity to those in need. This took the form of sizeable dotal and charitable donations within and beyond the family. In one of the first attempts to explore the philanthropy of the Venetian workforce, this article challenges the existing scholarly view that charity was the sole responsibility of the government and the nobility in early modern Venice. It further shows that marriage was not merely a financial union for the popolani; it was a sanctuary for lasting companionship. Ultimately, the article offers a fresh vista onto the socio‐economic role of the popolani in early modern Venice.     

‘To help keep the home going’: female labour supply in interwar London

Most prior work on historical female labour supply has been confined to looking at the female labour force participation decision. This article uses the detailed information on weekly hours of work and wages contained in the New Survey of London Life and Labour (NSLLL) (1928–32) to provide the first estimation of both the participation and the hours‐of‐work decisions for female workers prior to the Second World War. The main finding is that the labour supply curve was negatively sloped—women worked longer hours at lower wages. It is also possible to compare the determinants of the labour force participation decision and the hours of work decision among females in the NSLLL. It appears that the labour force participation decision was more strongly related to household income level than to own wages, while the hours of work decision among working women was more strongly related to the wage level than to household income. Finally, the article also examines the differential labour market behaviour of married women, female household heads, and young single women; most striking among these results is the evident added‐worker effect on married women of the onset of the Great Depression in 1930.     

Information asymmetries and craft guilds in pre‐modern markets: evidence from Italian proto‐industry

This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high‐quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent‐seeking purposes.