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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...

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,...

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e†, a dispersion measure that also equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality...

The main purpose of this paper is to report on an initial validation of methods for dealing with micro-census data with no delineated households. After describing the 1819 census of Rostock we test the possibilities of using an algorithm that creates households according to a strictly defined...

The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay...

This study examines the relationship between growing inequality within the population, and the general mortality decline in Finland after 1971. The general mortality trend is considered as a simultaneous shift of population groups toward lower mortality over time, with the group-specific...

This study examines the variation in mortality and mortality trends among different regions in India since the 1970s using data from the Sample Registration System (SRS). Evaluation of the SRS data quality confirms reliability for children and adults under the age of 60 years. Analysis of...