Project Details
Projekt
The Implications of Experience and Expectations for Demographic Decisions: Germany, 1871-2000
Applicant
Professor Dr. Jochen Streb
Subject Area
Economic and Social History
Term
from 2015 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 275188639
The central purpose of this project is to study how individuals (or couples) formed their expectations relevant to demographic decision-making in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. In principal, historical expectations can be observed in two different ways. Economists prefer to infer expectations from observable economic behavior related to the underlying expectations. In contrast, historians rely on individual testimonies taken from written sources such as diaries and letters. We propose to combine both methods. On the one hand, we will use econometric analysis to identify changes in marriage and fertility rates that might have been caused by short-term (and long-term) changes in expectations. For this purpose we require three different types of data sets. The first data set will concentrate on monthly marriage and fertility rates on the German level. The second on will be a cross-section with region- or district-specific demographic and economic data. The third data set will make use of the more detailed information provided by population censuses. In addition to this statistical data, we will examine historical diaries collected in the Deutsche Tagebucharchiv. Content analysis of historical diaries will yield information about what individuals knew at the point of decision making, and how they formed and changed their expectations. We consider the whole range of models of expectations suggested by the literature such as, for example, adaptive and rational expectations or economic learning. In particular, we want to learn more about the sources the individuals used to update their information. The results of the content analysis will then be used in our econometric models.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
International Connection
USA
Cooperation Partners
Timothy Guinnane; Professorin Anna Raute, Ph.D.
