Crowd-sourced Chinese genealogies as data for demographic and economic history
评估众包中国族谱数据在人口与经济史定量研究中的可用性，发现其虽存在选择偏差，但能反映合理的人口增长和性别比趋势，且规模大、时间跨度长，适合跨区域和跨时间分析。
This paper evaluates the usefulness of crowd-sourced Chinese genealogical data for quantitative research in demography and economic history. I first examine whether genealogies—despite well-known selection biases—produce demographic patterns consistent with established historical knowledge of China. Comparisons with existing studies show that aggregate population-growth trends and sex ratios over time align reasonably well with established demographic and historical findings, suggesting that genealogies, though selective, capture coherent and interpretable patterns. Building on these plausibility checks, the paper argues that the main value of genealogical data lies in their scalability and temporal depth, particularly as crowd-sourced digitization vastly expands the number of available records. These features make genealogies well suited to analyses that leverage variation across regions and over time, an approach that is central in modern economic history.