ABSTRACT
The account books of long-standing institutions such as monasteries, universities, hospitals, courts, and private landed estates have an enormous potential for quantitative history. They can be used to collect prices, wages and rents which are useful for macro and micro historical topics, including the reconstruction of historical national income accounts, the study of inequality, tracking the evolution of human capital skill premia over time, studies of the standard of living, gender pay differentials, and even the histories of specific professions. They also permit building price indices which provide a long-term measure of inflation over time, a precondition to interpreting past monetary amounts. Even for European history, there is still enormous potential for the usage of these sources; in other parts of the world, where equivalent sources often also exist despite the late formation of modern states, their usage is still in its infancy.
