ECONOMIC GROWTH CENTER YALE UNIVERSITY P.O. Box 208269 New Haven, CT 06520-8269 http://www.econ.yale.edu/~egcenter/ CENTER DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 869 TWO STATISTICAL PROBLEMS IN THE PRINCETON PROJECT ON THE EUROPEAN FERTILITY TRANSITION John C. Brown Clark University and Timothy W. Guinnane Yale University September 2003 Notes: Center Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments. An earlier version of this paper was circulated under a slightly different title, and was revised while Guinnane was visiting the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. The paper is part of a larger project; see Brown, Guinnane, and Lupprian (1993) and Brown and Guinnane (2002) for additional discussion. For comments and suggestions we are grateful to Jan van Bavel, Theo Engelen, Avery Guest, Sriya Iyer, Christopher Meissner, Carolyn Moehling, Mary MacKinnon, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Cormac Ó Gráda, Barbara Okun, Matthias Schuendeln, and seminar participants at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and the N.W. Posthumus Institute. This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We are especially grateful to Patrick Galloway for his comments and for helping us to construct extracts from his Prussian data. This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network electronic library at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=445901 An index to papers in the Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper Series is located at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~egcenter/research.htm