Although this paper was submitted roughly a month ago, I am now making available as a working paper. It is drawn from my PhD dissertation with some edits over the basket to measure real wages. Basically, its the first paper to measure living standards from 1688 to 1775 in Canada using a welfare ratio approach commonly used by economic historians. The paper can be found here on SSRN and the abstract is below:
This paper uses a novel dataset of prices and wages from the French colony of Quebec (Canada’s second largest province today) between 1688 and 1775 in order to measure living standards during the colonial era. Using these data, I find that Quebec experienced no growth over the long-run, and that for much of the period, Quebec was poorer than the American colonies and England, while not being appreciably richer than France. However, this last conclusion is sensitive to changes in the basket used to compare wages.
Vincent Geloso 