The Contribution of Payments in-Kind to Pre-Industrial Workers’ Remunerations: Evidence from Florence and its Countryside.

This chapter sheds new light on the contribution of in-kind payments to pre-industrial workers’ remunerations drawing on the experiences in rural and urban Tuscan labour markets between the late Middle Ages and the modern period. The results point to large differences in the share and composition of non-monetary payments between urban and rural labour markets, across sectors, skills, and individual workers either. These findings have implications for construction of wage series as failure to account for these differences can lead to underestimation of the level of wage, especially in rural areas where the contribution of non-monetary payments was larger than in cities.