Study title

The study constructs new series of nominal wages in industry and crafts as well as a new consumer goods price index for the period 1850-1889; the coefficient of the two series gives the real wage. While such information was collected and published by government agencies from the late 1880s onwards, the decades before are part of the pre-statistical age. After all, information is available from municipal authorities, from branches of territorial state authorities and from individual companies. For the construction of a new nominal wage series, the current study refer to Kuczynski´s material (1961/62), supplements it with information from individual studies of the past 50 years, and constructs wage indices for the heavy ironware, machine construction, mining, printing, and municipal construction industries on this basis by means of unbalanced panel regression with fixed effects. Of the 38 individual wage series on which these sector indices are based, 27 come from Kuczynski, the remainder from more recent studies. Wages in the textile sector are represented by those in the cotton industry. The study uses the wage series published by Kirchhain (1977). Weighted according to employment figures, all these sector-specific series (excluding miners´ wages) are aggregated into a Fisher index of nominal wages in industry and crafts. Both this index and the indices at sector level are linked in 1888/89 with the series by Hoffmann (1965); the resulting values denote annual earnings in Marks. The sector indices differ little from those of Kuczynski and Hoffmann despite the expansion of the database and the different methodology of index construction, but the aggregated index shows a stronger growth rate than that of Kuczynski; the latter index is obviously erroneous (Pfister 2018, 576). The consumer goods price index is based on five sub-indices for (1) food, (2) beverages and luxury foods, (3) rent, (4) furniture, household goods and heating, and (5) clothing. The...