Long-Term Demographic Interactions in Precensus England

Abstract

"Modern time series methods are applied to the analysis of annual demographic data for England, 1541-1800. Evidence is found of non-stationarity in the series and of co-integration among the series. Building on economic models of historical demography, optimal inferential procedures are implemented to estimate the structural parameters of long-term equilibria among the variables. Evidence is found for a small, but significant, Malthusian 'preventive check' as well as interactions between fertility, mortality and nuptiality that are consistent with the predictions often made in demographic studies. Tentative experiments to detect the influence of environmental factors fail to reveal any significant impact on the estimates obtained."

The Preventive Check in Medieval and Preindustrial England

“…All find little if any impact of living standards on marriage rates (Lee 1981;Weir 1984;Bailey and Chambers 1993;Lee and Anderson 2001;Crafts and Mills 2009). This paper uses new data on medieval and early modern marriages and finds, by contrast, that a strong positive check operated.…”

Post‐Malthusian Dynamics in Pre‐Industrial Scandinavia

“…2 Time series-based analyses, most of which focus on England, include Bailey and Chambers (1993); Lee and Anderson (2002); Nicolini (2007); Crafts and Mills (2009); Rathke and Sarferaz (2010); Klemp (2012). Ashraf and Galor (2011) establish evidence in the cross-country context, for which the Malthusian theory predicts that technologically more advanced countries should be more populated but no richer.…”

Was Malthus right? A VAR analysis of economic and demographic interactions in pre-industrial England

“…A usual strategy to study their interactions is to design a structural model, in general including speci…c equations for fertility, mortality, real wages and population growth and to estimate the parameters of these equations. Several models of this kind have been proposed and, although in essence they are very similar, each model tends to include di¤erent sets of variables, presents its own version of the structural equations and is estimated with di¤erent econometric techniques (Lee 1985b, 1993, Tsoulouhas 1992, Bailey and Chambers 1993. There is another approach in which, instead of de…ning a priori an underlying structural model, researchers simply represent each variable as a function of the actual and lagged values of the other variables but, of course, at the cost of imposing other kinds of restrictions to identify the relevant interactions.…”

“…2 Eckstein et al (1986) introduced the methodology based on vector autoregressions (VAR) into historical-demographic research. This approach allows for estimations with less restrictive speci…cations and, more importantly, introduces the possibility of distinguishing between the endogenous and the exogenous component of the interaction between variables.…”