Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies
(2023) Cliometrica : journal of historical economics and econometric history — Vol. 17, n° 1, p. 155-183 (2023)
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- Abstract
- Under income-differentiated mortality, poverty measures suffer from a selection bias: they do not count the missing poor (i.e., persons who would have been counted as poor provided they did not die prematurely). The Pre-Industrial period being characterized by an evolutionary advantage (i.e., a higher number of surviving children per household) of the non-poor over the poor, one may expect that the missing poor bias is substantial during that period. This paper quantifies the missing poor bias in Pre-Industrial societies, by computing the hypothetical headcount poverty rates that would have prevailed provided the non-poor did not benefit from an evolutionary advantage over the poor. Using data on Pre-Industrial England and France, we show that the sign and size of the missing poor bias are sensitive to the degree of downward social mobility.
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Lefebvre, M., Pestieau, P., & Ponthiere, G. (2023). Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies. Cliometrica : journal of historical economics and econometric history, 17(1), 155-183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-022-00243-y (Original work published 2023)