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

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: demographic; development; migration; health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-05-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02922398v3
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02922398

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