Compare methods

	Historical Event-History Demography	Real-Wage and Welfare-Ratio Analysis
Field	Historical Demography	Economic History
Family	Survival analysis	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2004	2001
Originator	Eurasian Population and Family History Project (Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, James Lee and collaborators)	Robert C. Allen (building on the Phelps Brown-Hopkins tradition)
Type	Hazard regression on longitudinal micro-data	Living-standards index construction
Seminal source	Bengtsson, T., Campbell, C., & Lee, J. Z. (2004). Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262025515	Allen, R. C. (2001). The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War. Explorations in Economic History, 38(4), 411-447.
Aliases	Historical hazard analysis, Eurasian Project event-history, Survival analysis of vital events, Micro-level demographic response models	Allen welfare ratio, Subsistence-basket real wages, Bare-bones and respectability baskets, Purchasing-power wage analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Historical event-history demography applies the statistical machinery of survival and hazard analysis to longitudinal individual-level historical data, modelling the risk that a person experiences a demographic event—death, marriage, migration, or a birth—as it varies with their changing circumstances. Pioneered by the Eurasian Population and Family History Project, whose comparative findings Bengtsson, Campbell and Lee synthesised in Life under Pressure (2004), the approach exploits population registers and reconstituted families that record events with precise dates alongside time-varying covariates such as grain prices, household composition and social standing. Its signature contribution is measuring the short-term demographic response to economic stress: how mortality, fertility and marriage reacted, differentially by class and household position, to harvest failure and price spikes. By moving from aggregate correlations to individual hazards, it reveals who bore the brunt of subsistence crises and how families buffered, or failed to buffer, their most vulnerable members.	Real-wage and welfare-ratio analysis measures the material living standards of working people by asking a deceptively simple question: how many baskets of basic goods could a worker's earnings buy? Robert Allen, refining the older Phelps Brown-Hopkins price-and-wage tradition, devised the welfare ratio—annual household earnings divided by the annual cost of a fixed consumption basket scaled to subsist a family. By specifying a spartan bare-bones basket meeting minimum calorie and nutrient needs, and a more generous respectability basket, and by converting wages and prices into grams of silver, Allen made living standards comparable across the great cities of Europe and Asia and across many centuries. The method underpinned his Great Divergence findings, showing that London and Amsterdam workers enjoyed welfare ratios far above bare subsistence while many Asian and southern European labourers hovered near it. It has become the workhorse for cross-cultural comparison of pre-industrial living standards.