Online Invited Seminar Talk
Demographic Change and Development from Crowdsourced Genealogies in Early Modern Europe
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography
Online Invited Seminar Talk, April 07, 2021
Guillaume Blanc from Brown University discusses how a crowdsourced dataset from publicly available genealogies can be used to study demographic change at the individual level in the distant past.
Abstract
This paper draws on a novel historical dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies to study demographic change and development at the individual level in the distant past. I reconstruct fertility series, identify migration in and out of urban centers, and provide novel measures and stylized facts in a period without census and with millions of ordinary individuals observed in thirty countries. For each country, I carefully show that selection is limited in the data. Then, I document patterns of human mobility, fertility, and adult mortality in Early Modern Europe, through the Industrial Revolution and demographic transition. Finally, I present several findings at a disaggregated level suggesting that substantial and rapid changes in preferences took hold with the Age of Enlightenment and played an important role in the transition from stagnation to growth. In particular, I estimate the onset of the decline in fertility in France in the 1760s, a hundred years before the rest of Europe and earlier than previously thought, and I find a weaker intergenerational persistence of fertility behavior in Europe as early as in the late eighteenth century.
About
Guillaume Blanc is a PhD student in Economics at Brown University. His research investigates the role of cultural and institutional forces in development using novel datasets to study populations in the past.
Register to Take Part
You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to Annett Döpke sekzagheni@demogr.mpg.de.
Online Invited Seminar Talk, April, 7th from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. (Rostock time)