Historical inequality is difficult to measure, especially at the subcountry level and beyond the top income shares. This article presents new evidence on the level of inequality in Manhattan from 1880 to 1910 using housing rents. Rental prices and characteristics, including geocodable locations, were collected from newspapers and provide extensive geographic coverage of the island, relevant for the overwhelming majority of its population where renting predominated. This provides a measure of consumption inequality at the household level, which helps to develop the picture of urban inequality for this period, when income and wealth measures are scarce. For large American cities, but particularly for New York, housing made up a large share of consumption expenditure and its consumption cannot be substituted, so this is a reliable and feasible way to identify the true trends in urban inequality across space and time.

中文翻译：

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十九世纪曼哈顿的不平等：来自住房市场的证据

历史上的不平等很难衡量，尤其是在次国家层面和超出最高收入份额的层面。本文使用住房租金提出了关于 1880 年至 1910 年曼哈顿不平等程度的新证据。从报纸上收集了租金价格和特征，包括可地理编码的位置，并提供了岛上广泛的地理覆盖范围，这与以租金为主的绝大多数人口相关。这提供了家庭层面消费不平等的衡量标准，有助于描绘这一时期的城市不平等状况，当时收入和财富衡量标准稀缺。对于美国大城市，尤其是纽约，住房占消费支出的很大一部分，其消费不可替代，