Data and Code for: Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Christopher L. Foote, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Kavish P. Gandhi, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Ellen Meara, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and NBER; Jonathan Skinner, Dartmouth College and NBER; Benjamin K. Couillard, University of Toronto

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
final_JEP_public			10/26/2021 12:13:PM

Project Citation:

Foote, Christopher L., Gandhi, Kavish P., Meara, Ellen, Skinner, Jonathan, and Couillard, Benjamin K. Data and Code for: Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2021. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-10-29. https://doi.org/10.3886/E144041V1

Project Description

Summary: The 21st century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply because states like New York or California benefited from having a high fraction of college-educated residents who enjoyed the largest health gains during the last several decades. Nor was higher dispersion in mortality caused entirely by the increasing importance of "deaths of despair,'' or by rising spatial income inequality during the same period. Instead, over time, state-level mortality has become increasingly correlated with state-level income; in 1992 income explained only 3 percent of mortality inequality, but by 2016 state-level income explained 58 percent. These mortality patterns are consistent with the view that high-income states in 1992 were better able to enact public health strategies and adopt behaviors that, over the next quarter-century, resulted in pronounced relative declines in mortality. The substantial longevity gains in high-income states led to greater cross-state inequality in mortality.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: health disparities; health behavior; health inequality

JEL Classification:
      I10 Health: General
      I12 Health Behavior
      I14 Health and Inequality
      I15 Health and Economic Development
      I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1959 – 2020 (For life expectancy); 1968 – 2019 (Mortality vs income); 1990 – 2017 (Our main dataset of mortality rates)

Universe: Decedents of all ages in the United States, between 1990-2017

Data Type(s): aggregate data

Collection Notes: The aggregate data is based on confidential microdata from the National Center for Health Statistics. All counts under 10 have been redacted for confidentiality purposes.

Methodology

Data Source: Mortality data are from NVSS's confidential microdata files for individual decedents; this data can be accessed via application at \url{https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/nvss-restricted-data.htm}. All other data sources are described in the Data Appendix of our paper, with links.

Unit(s) of Observation: State-Year-Age Group

Geographic Unit: state

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V1 [2021-10-29]

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