Journal article
Rethinking age heaping: a cautionary tale from nineteenth-century Italy
- Abstract:
- Age heaping is widely employed as an indicator of human capital, more specifically of numeracy. We re-examine the age heaping–numeracy link in the light of evidence from nineteenth-century Italian censuses, in which education explains little of the variation in age heaping. We argue that in general age heaping is most plausibly interpreted as an indicator of cultural, economic, and institutional modernization rather than a straightforward measure of individual cognitive skills. We do not rule out the use of age heaping as a numeracy indicator, but this needs to be done with research designs that are alert to historical specificities of the context under investigation.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 960.0KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1111/ehr.13087
Authors
- Publisher:
- Wiley
- Journal:
- Economic History Review More from this journal
- Volume:
- 75
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 111-137
- Publication date:
- 2021-06-16
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-04-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1468-0289
- ISSN:
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0013-0117
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1172738
- Local pid:
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pubs:1172738
- Deposit date:
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2021-04-21
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- A'Hearn et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © 2021 The Authors. The Economic History Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Economic History Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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