IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/exehis/v54y2014icp27-47.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Housing and the cost of living in early modern Toledo

Author

Listed:
  • Drelichman, Mauricio
  • González Agudo, David

Abstract

Data on housing costs and rental markets for the early modern period are notoriously scarce. Using a new database of rent paid on 183 properties belonging to the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo between 1489 and 1600, we reconstruct housing costs for various social groups and trace the effect of exogenous shocks on the rental market using hedonic techniques. We document a well-functioning market that responded swiftly and predictably to exogenous shocks. We then explore the impact of adding rent to early modern price indices and estimates of living standards. Price indices show a moderate effect. The addition of rent reduces the gap between Toledo and two northern European locations by up to 9.5%.

Suggested Citation

  • Drelichman, Mauricio & González Agudo, David, 2014. "Housing and the cost of living in early modern Toledo," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 27-47.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:exehis:v:54:y:2014:i:c:p:27-47
    DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2014.08.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001449831400031X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.eeh.2014.08.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. à Lvarez-Nogal, Carlos & Prados De La Escosura, Leandro, 2007. "The decline of Spain (1500–1850): conjectural estimates," European Review of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11(3), pages 319-366, December.
    2. Francisco Requena‐Silvente & James Walker, 2006. "Calculating Hedonic Price Indices with Unobserved Product Attributes: An Application to the UK Car Market," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 73(291), pages 509-532, August.
    3. Allen, Robert C. & Bengtsson, Tommy & Dribe, Martin (ed.), 2005. "Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199280681, Decembrie.
    4. W. Erwin Diewert, 2003. "Hedonic Regressions. A Consumer Theory Approach," NBER Chapters, in: Scanner Data and Price Indexes, pages 317-348, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Horrell, Sara, 1996. "Home Demand and British Industrialization," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 56(3), pages 561-604, September.
    6. Rosen, Sherwin, 1974. "Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 82(1), pages 34-55, Jan.-Feb..
    7. Glaeser, Edward L., 2008. "Cities, Agglomeration, and Spatial Equilibrium," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199290444, Decembrie.
    8. Drelichman, Mauricio, 2005. "The curse of Moctezuma: American silver and the Dutch disease," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 349-380, July.
    9. Peter H. Lindert & Jeffrey G. Williamson, 1983. "English Workers’Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 36(1), pages 1-25, February.
    10. Reher, David S. & Ballesteros, Esmeralda, 1993. "Precios y salarios en Castilla la Nueva: La construccion de un índice de salarios reales, 1501–1991," Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11(1), pages 101-151, March.
    11. Antonello E. Scorcu & Roberto Zanola, 2010. "The 'Right' Price for Art Collectibles. A Quantile Hedonic Regression Investigation of Picasso Paintings," Working Paper series 01_10, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
    12. Allen, Robert C., 2001. "The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 411-447, October.
    13. Raff, Daniel & Wachter, Susan & Yan, Se, 2013. "Real estate prices in Beijing, 1644 to 1840," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 368-386.
    14. Liao, Wen-Chi & Wang, Xizhu, 2012. "Hedonic house prices and spatial quantile regression," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 16-27.
    15. Ringrose, David, 1973. "The Impact of a New Capital City: Madrid, Toledo, and New Castile, 1560-1660," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 33(4), pages 761-791, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrés Calderón-Fernández & Héctor García-Montero & Enrique Llopis-Agelán, 2017. "New research guidelines for living standards, consumer baskets, and prices in Madrid and Mexico," Working Papers 097, "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.
    2. Damian Clarke & Manuel Llorca Jaña & Daniel Pailañir, 2023. "The use of quantile methods in economic history," Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(2), pages 115-132, April.
    3. Kholodilin, Konstantin A., 2016. "War, Housing Rents, and Free Market: Berlin's Rental Housing during World War I," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 20(3), pages 322-344.
    4. Jaime Reis, 2016. "The Gross Agricultural Output of Portugal: A Quantitative, Unified Perspective, 1500-1850," Working Papers 0098, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    5. Gürer Karagedikli & Ali Coşkun Tunçer, 2021. "House prices in the Ottoman Empire: evidence from eighteenth‐century Edirne," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(1), pages 6-33, February.
    6. Drelichman, Mauricio & González Agudo, David, 2020. "The Gender Wage Gap in Early Modern Toledo, 1550–1650," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 80(2), pages 351-385, June.
    7. Ali Coşkun Tuncer & Gürer Karagedikli, 2016. "‘The people next door’: housing and neighbourhood in eighteenth-century Ottoman Edirne," Working Papers 16010, Economic History Society.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mauricio Drelichman & David Gonzalez Agudo, 2012. "What price a roof? Housing and the cost of living in 16th-century Toledo," Working Papers 12004, Economic History Society.
    2. Hernán Enríquez Sierra & Carlos Barreto Nieto & Carolina Correa Caro & Jacobo Campo Robledo, 2013. "Precio del suelo y regalías en Colombia: un análisis espacial para los municipios productores de petróleo," Revista Desarrollo y Sociedad, Universidad de los Andes,Facultad de Economía, CEDE, June.
    3. Robert Allen & Robert C. Allen, 2007. "Pessimism Preserved: Real Wages in the British Industrial Revolution," Economics Series Working Papers 314, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    4. Andrés Calderón-Fernández & Héctor García-Montero & Enrique Llopis-Agelán, 2017. "New research guidelines for living standards, consumer baskets, and prices in Madrid and Mexico," Working Papers 097, "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.
    5. Carlos Álvarez-Nogal & Leandro Prados De La Escosura, 2013. "The rise and fall of Spain (1270–1850)," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 66(1), pages 1-37, February.
    6. Hill, Robert J. & Trojanek, Radoslaw, 2022. "An evaluation of competing methods for constructing house price indexes: The case of Warsaw," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    7. Bergoña Álvarez & Fernando Ramos Palencia, 2016. "The Role of human capital in pre-industrial societies: skills and earnings in eighteenth-century Castile (Spain)," Working Papers 0099, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    8. Allen, Robert C., 2001. "The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 411-447, October.
    9. Voth, Hans-Joachim & Hersh, Jonathan, 2009. "Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods and the Rise of European Living Standards after 1492," CEPR Discussion Papers 7386, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    10. Ernesto López Losa & Santiago Piquero Zarauz, 2016. "Spanish real wages in the Northern-Western European mirror, 1500-1800. On the timings and magnitude of the Little Divergence in Europe," Documentos de Trabajo (DT-AEHE) 1607, Asociación Española de Historia Económica.
    11. J. I. Andrés Ucendo & R. Lanza García, 2014. "Prices and real wages in seventeenth-century Madrid," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(3), pages 607-626, August.
    12. Paul Chwelos, 2003. "Approaches to performance measurement in hedonic analysis: Price indexes for laptop computers in the 1990's," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(3), pages 199-224.
    13. Trojanek, Radoslaw & Huderek-Glapska, Sonia, 2018. "Measuring the noise cost of aviation – The association between the Limited Use Area around Warsaw Chopin Airport and property values," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 103-114.
    14. James Foreman-Peck & Peng Zhou, 2021. "Fertility versus productivity: a model of growth with evolutionary equilibria," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 34(3), pages 1073-1104, July.
    15. Joan Monras, 2020. "Immigration and Wage Dynamics: Evidence from the Mexican Peso Crisis," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 128(8), pages 3017-3089.
    16. Joseph Molitoris & Martin Dribe, 2016. "Industrialization and inequality revisited: mortality differentials and vulnerability to economic stress in Stockholm, 1878–1926," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 20(2), pages 176-197.
    17. Joan Monras, 2019. "Minimum Wages and Spatial Equilibrium: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 37(3), pages 853-904.
    18. Badi H. Baltagi & Georges Bresson & Jean‐Michel Etienne, 2015. "Hedonic Housing Prices in Paris: An Unbalanced Spatial Lag Pseudo‐Panel Model with Nested Random Effects," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(3), pages 509-528, April.
    19. Boško Mijatović & Branko Milanović, 2021. "The real urban wage in an agricultural economy without landless farmers: Serbia, 1862–1910," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(2), pages 424-448, May.
    20. Qing Pei & David D Zhang & Harry F Lee & Guodong Li, 2014. "Climate Change and Macro-Economic Cycles in Pre-Industrial Europe," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(2), pages 1-8, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Housing; Rent indices; Living standards; Hedonic analysis; Early modern period; Spain;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand
    • R31 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Housing Supply and Markets
    • N34 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Europe: 1913-
    • N94 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: 1913-

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:exehis:v:54:y:2014:i:c:p:27-47. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/622830 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.