Subjective well-being and inequality in Spain’s decline

Abstract

AbstractThe economic decline of Early Modern Spain offers an opportunity to explore how it affected perceptions of welfare and inequality. We provide an answer based on the Bull of the Crusade, an inexpensive alms collected by the Hispanic Monarchy and massively purchased by a highly religious population that believed in its spiritual benefits. The purchase of the bull represented a public practice of religion that captured people’s religiosity and belief in the afterlife and had a positive impact on their spiritual well-being. We find that our measure of spiritual well-being—the ratio of (normalized) bulls sold to their recipients (the population aged 12 and above)—deteriorated in the late 1570s and 1580s and the 1640s but improved during the 1670s, while subjective inequality—the ratio between the number of bulls sold to those who deemed themselves affluent and those sold to common individuals—increased from 1600–1640 and fell in the 1580s and early 1590s and the 1670s. Hence, improving (deteriorating) subjective well-being was accompanied by declining (improving) subjective inequality through the seventeenth century.