A general method of correction for age misreporting in census populations.

The paper provides a general method for estimating age-reporting errors from two consecutive census populations along the lines suggested by Demeny and Shorter (1968). When the true age structures in the two censuses are the same, the general method and the Demeny-Shorter method give identical results. However, the latter method faces increasingly the problem of inconsistency of the results with the underlying sssumptions as the disparity between the age structures becomes more and more significant. The present method is more general in the sense that it always gives consitent results irrespective of the populations under consideration.