Replication files for Fertility and mortality responses to short-term economic stress: Evidence from two Hungarian sample populations, 1819-1914

Demographic
response to short-term price fluctuations can be interpreted as an indicator of
living standards in pre-modern societies. In this paper, we demonstrate how
childbearing and infant and child mortality responded to changes in rye prices
in two nineteenth-century Hungarian sub-regions. We conducted a micro-level
demographic analysis based on family reconstitution data and multivariate
statistical methods (event history analysis). Our findings reveal that both childbearing and child mortality differed between
the two regions, and that both were affected by short-term economic
fluctuations, but that the responses depended strongly on local economic,
demographic and socio-cultural conditions. Child mortality responded markedly to
rising rye prices, but in our Central Hungarian study population with high
fertility and high infant and child mortality, this response was stronger than
in our West Hungarian study population with more modest child mortality and
fertility. At the same time, the mortality response to changing prices increased
over time in both populations as a result of local industrialization in the
latter and modernization of the surrounding region in the former. An immediate
and presumably deliberate fertility response of the landless to rising food
prices was more characteristic of the Western study population before 1870
while it was not observed in the Central population. Our results, therefore,
emphasize the similarities with evidence from other European or Asian
communities, and – at the same time – the importance of local context in
explaining our findings.