Are the birthdates of our ancestors real? Date of birth misregistration in twentieth-century Poland

Jacek Cypryjański

Population Studies, 2022, vol. 76, issue 1, 157-168

Abstract: This study aimed to explore the phenomenon of birthdate misregistration, using birth data from 45,226,875 Polish citizens, that is, all those born 1900–2000 and registered in Poland’s Universal Electronic System for Registration of the Population (PESEL). I transformed the data into a daily series of births, detrended by dividing each value by the daily average for the relevant year. Next, I selected the dates with the highest deviations based on the coefficients of the linear regression model with dummy variables. Finally, I estimated the size of the phenomenon in subsequent years by comparing the numbers of births on selected dates to their expected values. This paper is the first to document the specificity, scale, duration, and probable causes of birthdate misregistration in Poland in the twentieth century.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00324728.2022.2034920 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpstxx:v:76:y:2022:i:1:p:157-168

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rpst20

DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2022.2034920

Access Statistics for this article

Population Studies is currently edited by John Simons, Francesco Billari, James J. Brown, John Cleland, Andrew Foster, John McDonald, Tom Moultrie, Mikko Myrsklä, Alice Reid, Wendy Sigle-Rushton, Ronald Skeldon and Frans Willekens

More articles in Population Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().