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Women of an uncertain age

Quantifying human capital accumulation in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century

Bibliographic Data

ID3483036
AuthorsMax Blum (0000-0003-4129-9873, Queen's University Belfast), Christopher L Colvin (0000-0002-8140-0115, Queen's University Belfast), Laura Mcatackney (0000-0002-3409-2594, Aarhus University), Eoin Mclaughlin (0000-0002-0307-3374, University of St Andrews)
Year2017
Volume70
Issue1
Pages187-223
Publication date2017-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Economic History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/ehr.12333
OpenAlexW2461773579
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited65

Geary and Stark find that Ireland's post-Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was largely due to total factor productivity growth rather than mass emigration. In this article, new long-run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland are devised in order to facilitate a better assessment of sources of this productivity growth, including the relative contribution of men and women. This is done by exploiting the frequency at which age data heap at round ages, widely interpreted as an indicator of a population's basic numeracy skills. Because Földvári, van Leeuwen, and van Leeuwen-Li find that gender-specific trends in this measure derived from census returns are biased by who is reporting and recording the age information, any computed numeracy trends are corrected using data from prison and workhouse registers, sources in which women ostensibly self-reported their age. The findings show that rural Irish women born early in the nineteenth century had substantially lower levels of human capital than uncorrected census data would otherwise suggest. These results are large in magnitude and thus economically significant. The speed at which women converged is consistent with Geary and Stark's interpretation of Irish economic history; Ireland probably graduated to Europe's club of advanced economies thanks in part to rapid advances in female human capital

Archaeology · Capital (architecture) · Capital accumulation · Demographic economics · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Human capital · Socioeconomics · Birth, Development, and Health · Global Health Care Issues · Irish and British Studies

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Unique citing works11
Citations per year1,38
Citation span2018 - 2026 (9)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 10
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