This study provides new evidence on the advance of literacy in Spain during the period 1860-1930. A novel dataset, built with historical information (over 8,000 municipalities) from the Spanish population censuses, enables us to describe this process in detail from the end of the Ancien Régime...

According to the classic demographic transition theory, mortality change was the key factor triggering the decline of fertility. In a recent paper Reher and Sanz-Gimeno studied the mechanisms which played a role in this process with individual longitudinal data for the Spanish town of Aranjuez....