Kin and birth order effects on male child mortality: three East Asian populations, 1716-1945.

Human child survival depends on adult investment, typically from parents. However, in spite of recent research advances on kin influence and birth order effects on human infant and child mortality, studies that directly examine the interaction of kin context and birth order on sibling differences in child mortality are still rare. Our study supplements this literature with new findings from large-scale individual-level panel data for three East Asian historical populations from northeast China (1789-1909), northeast Japan (1716-1870), and north Taiwan (1906-1945), where preference for sons and first-borns is common.

Ancestry Matters: Patrilineage Growth and Extinction.

Patrilineality, the organization of kinship, inheritance, and other key social processes based on patrilineal male descent, has been a salient feature of social organization in China and many other societies for centuries. Because continuity or growth of the patrilineage was the central focus of reproductive strategies in such societies, we introduce the number of patrilineal male descendants generations later as a stratification outcome. By reconstructing and analyzing 20,000 patrilineages in two prospective, multi-generational population databases from 18 and 19 century China, we show that patrilineages founded by high status males had higher growth rates for the next 150 years.

Household Context and Individual Departure: The Case of Escape in Three 'Unfree' East Asian Populations, 1700-1900.

In the past, many people were 'unfree' in the sense that their movement was restricted, and out-migration without permission was regarded and recorded as 'escape.' Even though such escape was common in the past, historical studies mostly neglect this form of migration. This paper examines escape in historical East Asia, focusing on the influence of household context and individual characteristics on the chances of escape, taking advantage of large-scale individual panel datasets from three adjacent unfree populations from northeast China, southeast Korea and northeast Japan in the 18 and 19 century.

New Sources for Comparative Social Science: Historical Population Panel Data From East Asia.

Comparison and comparability lie at the heart of any comparative social science. Still, precise comparison is virtually impossible without using similar methods and similar data. In recent decades, social demographers, historians, and economic historians have compiled and made available a large number of micro-level data sets of historical populations for North America and Europe.

Kinship matters: long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration, historical evidence from northeast China, 1792-1909*.

Unlike previous migration studies which mainly focus on individual migration, this article examines the long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration and resettlement. Using a unique Chinese historical population database, we trace 30,517 males from childhood onwards between 1792 and 1909, 542 of whom experienced childhood migration. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis and include a fixed effect of common grandfather to account for unobservable characteristics of the extended family.

Kinship and the Long-Term Persistence of Inequality in Liaoning, China, 1749-2005.

We demonstrate that in northeast China before the 20th century, kin groups played a important role in structuring patterns of inequality. There were substantial differences in the demographic behavior and social attainment of individuals according to kin group membership even after differences between villages and households were accounted for. There was also considerable continuity in the relative status of kin groups before the 20th century.

Fertility control in historical China revisited: New Methods for an Old Debate.

We revisit the debate over deliberate control of reproduction in historical China through a reanalysis of data from the Qing (1644-911) Imperial Lineage that accounts for physiological or other differences between couples that affected their chances of having children. Even though studies of contemporary and historical European fertility suggest that failing to control for such differences may obscure evidence of parity-specific control, previous studies of historical Chinese fertility have not accounted for them. We show that in the Lineage, failure to account for such differences leads the association between number of children already born and the chances of having another birth to appear to be positive, but that once they are accounted for properly, the relationship is inverted.

Long-term mortality consequences of childhood family context in Liaoning, China, 1749-1909.

We examine the effects on adult and old age mortality of childhood living arrangements and other aspects of family context in early life. We focus on features of family context that have already been shown to be associated with infant or child mortality in historical and developing country populations. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis to longitudinal, individual-level household register data for a rural population in northeast China from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.