DOI: 10.3886/e121862
title: Data and Codes for: The Origins of Italian Human Capital Divides: New evidence from Marriage Signatures, ca. 1815

description: This paper quantitatively assesses to what extent signatures in marriage certificates can inform about literacy rates in the past. The new figures are based on a novel and balanced random sample of marriage certificates for Italy in 1815. Such estimates are compared to all alternative sources available for close years. The interdisciplinary empirical methodology is as important as the results. Two main findings emerge. First, marriage certificates, although recorded from different pre-unitary states, can accurately measure literacy rates only when accompanied by rigorous sampling procedures. Indeed, the proposed empirical approach allows to go from local to aggregate estimates that are in line with other estimates for the period. Second, North vs Centre-South divides in 1815 are lower than previously suggested.
description: <br>The sample should have a balanced picture of the Italian population, so that inferences are representative and not biased towards overrepresented areas. However, the marriage certificates digitised online are incomplete, and some areas of the North have fewer archives than their population suggests. Since by construction the sampling is stratified by archive, this would over-represent areas where the data collection is complete. <br>For this reason, I construct three weights: the first weight corrects for within-archive variability in the number of contracts, the second corrects for the between-region variability in archive coverage, and the third weight for the share of urban areas in the region. The 1815 population estimates were drawn from \cite{mariella2020reconstruction}, whose data reconstruction can be considered the most updated and complete, and is constructed using a wealth of micro population studies. I then aggregated at the level of unitary region in the Centre-North, and at the level of pre-unitary provinces in the South. I compared the resulting 1815 estimation with a similar estimation derived from other sources (ASI (1853), Castiglioni (1862)). The population in urban areas was derived from the 1800 estimations of Malanima (2016), an updated version of the database created in Malanima (1998). I consider 9'000 in 1800 as the minimum population threshold for larger towns in 1815, and 4'000 as minimum threshold for smaller towns. I also assume that when town size in 1800 is smaller than 5'000, it is 4'000. However, the share of smaller towns in the 1861 population census was much higher than the one derived by Malanima (2016), who assumes to have population 0 to towns that had less than 5'000 inhabitants in 1800. Assuming smaller towns to have a population of 4'000 partially corrected the discrepancy between the census and the sample urban-rural weights.
description: Presence of Common Scales: The literacy rates are based on a binary scale: either able to sign, or not able to sign. Sometimes, the enumerators explicitly mentioned that the respondents declared to be illiterate.
description: I use a one-stage clustered sampling stratified by region scheme: I randomly select a number of villages within the village list of each archival unit. Then I weight the total sample size by the regional population weight and the number of contracts to have in each archive over the total of the region, and start collecting the required marriage certificates for each archival unit. <br>
description: Smallest Geographic Unit: Unitary region for the North and Centre of Italy; pre-unitary province for Southern Italy
description: record abstracts; web scraping;