Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel

Auke Rijpma (), Jeanne Cilliers () and Johan Fourie
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Auke Rijpma: Department of History, Utrecht University
Jeanne Cilliers: Department of Economic History, Lund University

No 06/2018, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787--1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84 percent of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.

Keywords: census; machine learning; micro-data; record linkage; panel data; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 N01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-his
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https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2018/wp062018/wp062018.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Record Linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel (2018)
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