Finnish Municipalities 1880 to 1974: Creating Harmonized Statistical Units Over a Century

Abstract

A rich universe of municipality-level or municipality-aggregated data is available for Finland, going back more than 150 years. The unit of analysis -- the municipality -- however, has been unstable across this period, thus making consistent data analysis difficult and time-consuming. I propose a transparent data-harmonization procedure, and provide the underlying data, crosswalks, and automated scripts to perform harmonization for the 1880 to 1974 time period.