Age heaping in Ireland worsened in the years after the Great Irish Famine, even as other measures of educational attainment improved. We show how demography can account for this seemingly conflicting pattern. Specifically, we argue that a greater propensity to emigrate typified the youngest...

Using the Irish experience of the Spanish flu, we demonstrate that pandemic mortality statistics are sensitive to the demographic composition of a country. We build a new demographic database for Ireland's 32 counties with vital statistics on births, ageing, migration and deaths. We then show...

Using the Irish experience of the Spanish flu, we demonstrate that pandemic mortality statistics are sensitive to the demographic composition of a country. We build a new demographic database for Ireland's 32 counties with vital statistics on births, ageing, migration and deaths. We then show...

This is a dataset of vital statistics and cohort component population estimates at a spatially-disaggregated level for the island of Ireland for the period 1911-1920. The raw data were digitised by the authors using official UK government statistics. The population estimates were then derived by...

What are the insights from historical pandemics for policymaking today? We carry out a systematic review of the literature on the impact of pandemics that occurred since the Industrial Revolution and prior to Covid-19. Our literature searches were conducted between June 2020 and September 2023,...

Why do we choose one language over another? Rival views see language frontiers as exogenous, driven by policy, or endogenous, determined by social, cultural and economic forces. We study language loss in nineteenth-century Ireland's bilingual society using individual-level data from the 1901...