Historical census data are a pivotal source for studying occupational dynamics, yet analyzing them is often challenging due to the large number of unique occupations and the need to standardize unspecific titles. A new methodology for attributing occupational titles to industrial sectors, demonstrated with the 1939 National Register for England and Wales (a dataset of approximately 42 million entries), produces findings that align with the trends across the agriculture and mining, secondary, and tertiary sectors identified in previous studies. At the subsector level, however, this procedure revises the shares for agricultural workers and individuals employed across the tertiary subsectors. At the district level, the sectoral allocation process results in a redistribution of workers into certain secondary subsectors driven by more precise sectoral estimations for previously underrepresented groups and the empirical allocation of generic laborers.

Despite a consensus about the main factors influencing economic mobility in Indonesia, such as labor-market opportunities and childhood circumstances, virtually nothing is known about how these factors increased economic standing in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The use of height data as a proxy for people’s economic situation, however, finds that whereas ethnicity was a strong predictor of economic status before Indonesia’s Independence, education assumed that role after 1946.