Demographic Transitions, Rural Flight, and Intergenerational Persistence: Evidence from Crowdsourced Genealogies

Guillaume Blanc

Lewis Lab Working Papers Series from Arthur Lewis Lab, The University of Manchester

Abstract: This paper draws on a novel dataset crowdsourced from publicly available online genealogies to study demographic change and development in Europe before modern censuses became available. Using millions of publicly available family trees, I reconstruct fertility from horizontal lineages and identify migration to and from urban centers. Then, I systematically compare the data to a range of representative sources in thirty countries and show that selection is limited after the mid-seventeenth century. Finally, I document novel stylized facts on the rural flight, the demographic transition, and the intergenerational persistence of migration, fertility, and longevity; providing suggestive evidence that substantial changes took hold in the eighteenth century, in the early stages of the transition from stagnation to growth.

Keywords: fertility; demography; migration; development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 N33 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his, nep-inv and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=72406 (application/pdf)

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:man:allwps:0006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Lewis Lab Working Papers Series from Arthur Lewis Lab, The University of Manchester Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jordi Caum-Julio ().