Parish Tax Records and Inequality
First-ever Gini coefficient for Copenhagen, reconstructed from parish tax records using OccCANINE and CHAOS.
Status: Active — data ready, paper at early stage
Parish tax records from 19th-century Denmark encode income information that has never been systematically extracted. This paper uses OccCANINE and CHAOS to convert these records into income estimates, producing — among other results — the first ever Gini coefficient for Copenhagen.
The paper contributes to questions about inequality, regional development, and the long-run effects of industrialization on income distributions. It also demonstrates the value of the measurement infrastructure built through OccCANINE and CHAOS: questions that were previously unanswerable become tractable once the tools are in place.
External obligation: occupational score estimates owed to Casper Worm Hansen (~1 afternoon of work).