Copenhagen Income Project
Reconstructing income distributions and inequality in 19th-century Copenhagen from records never before analyzed at scale.
Status: Active — data digitization running
What did the income distribution look like in Copenhagen in 1878? No one has ever computed a Gini coefficient for it — until now.
The Copenhagen Income project applies the full measurement stack — large-scale digitization (using Gemini), OccCANINE for occupational standardization, and CHAOS for income estimation — to a set of administrative records from 19th-century Copenhagen that have never before been analyzed at scale. The result will be the first reconstruction of income distributions and inequality trajectories for the Danish capital across the 19th century.
The project answers questions about inequality, regional convergence, and economic geography, while demonstrating what becomes possible when the measurement infrastructure is in place.
External obligation: links owed to Casper Worm Hansen.