THE IMPACT OF REAL WAGE AND MORTALITY FLUCTUATIONS ON FERTILITY AND NUPTIALITY IN PRECENSUS ENGLAND

This paper explores the responses of fertility and nuptiality to fluct uations in real wages and mortality that can be inferred from annual s eries of English historical data over the period 1542 to 1800. The pap er begins with a review of the time series properties of the data and summarizes the long-term equilibrium relationships identified in previ ous work. A Vector Error Correction Mechanism (VECM) is then proposed to study the observed short-term fluctuations in a way that is compati ble with longterm equilibria, Following estimation of the parameters o f the VECM, an investigation is made of the impact of shocks to real w ages and mortality on demographic variables as measured by generalized impulse responses and persistence profiles.