The Implications of Experience and Expectations for Demographic Decisions: Germany, 1871-2000

该项目的中心目的是研究个人(或夫妇)如何形成与十九世纪末和二十世纪人口决策有关的期望。原则上，历史预期可以通过两种不同的方式来观察。经济学家更喜欢从与潜在预期相关的可观察经济行为中推断预期。相比之下，历史学家依赖于从日记和信件等书面来源获得的个人证词。我们建议将这两种方法结合起来。一方面，我们将使用计量经济学分析来确定预期的短期(和长期)变化可能导致的结婚率和生育率的变化。为此，我们需要三种不同类型的数据集。第一个数据集将集中在德国水平上的月度结婚率和生育率。第二个将是一个横截面，其中包含特定地区的人口和经济数据。第三组数据将利用人口普查提供的更详细的信息。除了这些统计数据外，我们还将研究德国《塔格布查尔奇夫报》收集的历史日记。对历史日记的内容分析将提供有关个人在决策时知道什么，以及他们如何形成和改变他们的预期的信息。我们考虑了文献中提出的各种预期模型，例如适应性和理性预期或经济学习。特别是，我们想了解更多关于个人用来更新信息的来源。然后，内容分析的结果将用于我们的计量经济模型。

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.