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Can the 16th and early 17th centuries in Poland-Lithuania and some other east-central European countries be characterized as a “Golden Age” in human capital? We trace the development of a specific human capital indicator during this period: numeracy. We draw upon new evidence for Poland and...

We trace the development of numeracy in Poland and Russia from the early 17th century onwards, and numeracy in Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania from the 18th century onwards. The fact that western Poland was doing relatively well during the 16th and early 17th centuries, but was not able to...

Over the last decades numerous studies have dealt with demographic differences between the former communist eastern part of Germany and western Germany. Although the demography of these two regions has converged with respect to mortality and overall fertility levels, non-marital births are the...

There are already several documented examples of recent increases in cohort fertility in Scandinavia, but for most countries, cohorts are too young to see if cohort fertility has increased. We produce new estimates of completed cohort fertility for cohorts born in the 1970s. We combine the best...

The 1970s worries of the "population bomb" were replaced in the 1990s with concerns of population aging driven by falling birth rates. Across the developed world, the nearly universally-used fertility indicator, the period total fertility rate, fell well below two children per woman. However,...

This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent “Eastern European family pattern.” This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility...

The notion of ‘patriarchy’ has pervaded the scholarly descriptions of peasant families in historical Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage,...

In this paper, I re-introduce the Gompertz model of age-specific fertility. This model has been rejected by past authors as fitting poorly to cross-sectional, or period rates. However, I find that the model fits very well to recent medium and low fertility cohort schedules in France, Italy, and...

This paper shows new evidence of a steady long-term decline in age of male sexual maturity since at least the mid-eighteenth century. A method for measuring the timing of male maturity is developed based on the age at which male young adult mortality accelerates. The method is applied to...