This study examines intergenerational mobility in China over 6 centuries using unique genealogical data on father-son pairs from 7 clans in Tongcheng County. Covering 18 generations and approximately 40,000 individuals, the analysis spans a broad set of social classes, from ordinary people to jinshi degree holders. The findings indicate that although social mobility was slow to change, mobility nonetheless underwent a sizable increase during the seventeenth century. The timing of the trends corroborates a number of key changes that affected mobility for commoners and for the highly educated elites. The results also show that intergenerational mobility and inequality are negatively correlated in the time series, a pattern previously observed in cross-sectional studies and commonly known as the Great Gatsby curve.

On page 476 of the text, in the second paragraph it states: “In comparison, the percent of individuals who can be linked in the Chinese Eight Banner Registers is 14.54% or 24.76% for one generation, depending on whether one considers Liaoning or Heilongjiang Province [Dong et al. (2015)].” This should instead read: “In comparison, the percent of individuals who can't be linked in the Chinese Eight Banner Registers is 14.54% or 24.76% for one generation, depending on whether one considers Liaoning or Heilongjiang Province [Dong et al. (2015)].”

The authors apologise for this error.

This paper discusses the use of Chinese genealogies for research on economic demography. I focus both on what is known about the genealogy as a data source, and what are the open questions for future research. Chinese genealogies contain records at the individual level. With the publication of new catalogs and efforts to collect genealogies, the number of genealogies is even larger than previously thought, with most dating to the late Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties. These records contain a rich source of information about the Chinese population history, over a period for which there is no alternative source of information. Yet, the source still remains largely unexploited. Although the work of transcribing the data is significant, and selection biases need to be carefully considered, preliminary analysis of the data for a sample of married men for Tongcheng County in Anhui Province suggests these data are a rich source of information for demographic and economics research.

The Zollverein was arguably the most important free trade agreement of the nineteenth century. Although 1834 is the official date of the Zollverein's establishment, member states joined in a non-random sequence over several decades because the benefits of becoming a member increased, both as the size of the union increased, and as membership in the union became increasingly important for accessing foreign markets. We incorporate the endogenous effects of accession into an estimate of the economic impact of the Zollverein customs union. Our estimated effects are several times larger than simple estimates that do not take these effects into account.

Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the Prussian-German customs union known as the Zollverein gradually unified a scattered confederation of sovereign states under an internal free trade agreement. This article uses grain prices to quantify the differential effect of the Zollverein for market integration among Zollverein members versus European powers that were not part of the Zollverein, including France, Switzerland, and the Habsburg Empire of Austria. Overall, this border effect is consistently and substantially less than border effect estimates from contemporary samples. For the 1834 liberalisation round, the implied border effect, calculated as the implied decrease in distance that comes about as the result of the customs border being eliminated, is between 140 and 160 kilometres, with the smaller distance for non-German speaking cities, and the larger distance for German–speaking cities. Thus, common language in this sample provides an additional benefit of lowering trade barriers by 11–15 percent in distance, making border elimination more valuable among German-speaking cities than for mixed-language-speaking cities. The article offers a few reasons for why I estimate smaller border effects than are found in studies on twentieth century economies, and the analysis gives a new historical perspective on what drives trade costs and changes in market integration.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Chinese state attempted to administer famine relief partly through a nationwide institution of local granaries. This article explores regional variations in the performance of this institution to understand the reasons for its ultimate breakdown. The evidence suggests granary storage levels were systematically lower in provinces that received more frequent central government disaster relief; and an unintended consequence of disaster relief was that it modified local incentives for self-insurance and led to an incompletely resolved moral-hazard problem. China's experience provides an instructive example of the long-term dynamics present in intergovernmental policies.