Crowd-sourced Chinese genealogies as data for demographic and economic history

Melanie Xue

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper evaluates the usefulness of crowd-sourced Chinese genealogical data for quantitative research in demography and economic history. I first examine whether genealogies—despite well-known selection biases—produce demographic patterns consistent with established historical knowledge of China. Comparisons with existing studies show that aggregate population-growth trends and sex ratios over time align reasonably well with established demographic and historical findings, suggesting that genealogies, though selective, capture coherent and interpretable patterns. Building on these plausibility checks, the paper argues that the main value of genealogical data lies in their scalability and temporal depth, particularly as crowd-sourced digitization vastly expands the number of available records. These features make genealogies well suited to analyses that leverage variation across regions and over time, an approach that is central in modern economic history.

Keywords: crowd-sourced genealogies; China; migration; sex ratios (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J13 N10 N35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2026-01-31
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Published in Explorations in Economic History, 31, January, 2026, 99. ISSN: 0014-4983

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