Judy Stephenson

British economic historian at University College London (Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction; previously at LSE and Oxford). She is the author of the most consequential recent challenge to the wage data underpinning Robert Allen’s high-wage thesis, and a leading methodologist of pre-industrial labour, pay, and the construction sector.

Intellectual program

Stephenson’s 2018 Economic History Review paper, “‘Looking for Work?’ Or ‘Looking for Workers?’”, attacks the foundations of Allen’s London real-wage series at the source. Allen’s high-wage induced-innovation argument — that expensive labour relative to cheap capital and energy made labour-saving mechanization uniquely profitable in Britain — depends on London builders’ wages being genuinely high. Working through the original institutional building accounts (Greenwich Hospital, St Paul’s, and similar large projects), Stephenson shows that the daily rates recorded in those ledgers were sums paid to contractors and master craftsmen, not the take-home earnings of the labourers who did the work. The contractor’s margin — overheads, profit, the difference between the day-rate billed and the wage actually disbursed — means the conventional series overstate workers’ pay, on her estimate by something on the order of 20–30%. The “high-wage economy” looks materially less high once the intermediary’s cut is removed.

The implication is not merely a data correction but a threat to the mechanism: if British wages were lower than Allen’s series imply, the relative-price case for why mechanization paid in Britain but not elsewhere weakens. Her finding runs in parallel with Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider’s reconstruction of low hand-spinning wages, and together the two lines form the most active empirical front against Allen. Contracts and Pay: Work in London Construction 1660–1785 (2020) develops the institutional and contractual history of the sector that makes sense of the markups, situating the wage question within how building labour was actually organized, hired, and paid.

Reception and contestation

Stephenson’s critique is widely regarded as a serious and well-documented intervention; it has reshaped how the wage-data literature treats institutional account books as evidence. Allen and others have contested the magnitude and the generality of the markup — how far the Greenwich-style accounts can be read as contractor fees, and whether the correction transfers to the wider wage series used in cross-city comparisons — so the dispute is live rather than settled. What is no longer controversial is that the provenance of the underlying wage records matters, and cannot be taken at face value.

Associated positions

• High wages & induced innovation — principal recent critic.

Key works

• “‘Looking for Work?’ Or ‘Looking for Workers?’ Days and Hours of Work in London Construction in the Eighteenth Century” (Economic History Review, 2018).
• Contracts and Pay: Work in London Construction 1660–1785 (2020).
• Numerous papers and blog posts on wage methodology and construction-history sources.