• DOI:10.26882/HISTAGRAR.083E08P
• Corpus ID: 233531248

Land inequality and numeracy in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth century

@inproceedings{PrezArts2021LandIA,
  title={Land inequality and numeracy in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth century},
  author={Mari Carmen P{\'e}rez-Art{\'e}s and Joerg Baten},
  year={2021}
}

• Mari Carmen Pérez-Artés, J. Baten
• Published 1 April 2021
• Economics, History

We assess the relationship between land inequality and human capital for the later part of the early modern period, focusing on individual-level evidence from Spain. Our main finding is that land inequality already had a significant negative effect on human capital formation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. We argue that this reflects the potential role of farmer-family-based social structure (as opposed to the social structure dominated by latifundia and day laborers) in the development of numeracy, consistent with earlier studies which argued that farmer households could (1) maintain a relatively favourable nutritional standard – a precondition for cognitive skills, (2) limit child labour and (3) were able to provide basic numerical skills in family farms. Our result is robust to including various controls and potential confounding variables.