Abstract
The quality of age reporting in Ireland worsened in the years after the 1845–1852 Great Irish Famine, even as measures of educational attainment improved. We show how Ireland’s age structure partly accounts for this seemingly conflicting pattern. Specifically, we argue that a greater propensity to emigrate typified the youngest segment (23–32-year-olds) used in conventional indices of age heaping. Any quantification of age heaping patterns must therefore be interpreted considering an older underlying population which is inherently more likely to heap. We demonstrate how age heaping indices can adjust for such demographic change by introducing age standardization.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | heae012 |
| Pages (from-to) | 28-48 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | European Review of Economic History |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 3 Sept 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published (in print/issue) - 28 Feb 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 The Author(s).
Data Access Statement
The data generated by the methods described in this paper are reported in a series of appendix tables (tables A3–A6), which are available as online supplementary material alongside Stata replication files. The underlying population data used in this article are available as a collection in the UK Data Service online repository: Clarkson, L.A., Kennedy, L., Crawford, E.M. and Dowling, M.W. (2011). Database of Irish historical statistics: population, 1821–1911. UK Data Service, SN: 3578, URL: http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-3578-1.Keywords
- ireland
- age heaping
- famine
- standardisation
- human capital
- historical
- demography
