Mapping the Human Capital of the Nordic Countries

This project will gather uniquely detailed individual level data on human capital from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Second World War. Human capital is often proxied by for example literacy, years of schooling, or years of work experience. For Denmark and Norway, however, extensive historical sources allow for the construction of much more detailed measures, including individual level information on grades as well as biographical information on the universe of high school graduates. The infrastructure provided by this grant allows us to finance the scanning of the necessary material, to purchase a server so that we can exploit machine learning to construct the database, and to finance the linking of our database to existing census records.