Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Mortality in the 20th Century: Evidence from the Carolinas

Trevon D. Logan, Ohio State University
John Parman, University of California, Davis

Racial and socioeconomic gaps in mortality persisted throughout the twentieth century. We know little about racial or socioeconomic gaps in cause-specific mortality or in how the two are related, largely due to data problems. In an attempt to overcome these problems, we link a random sample of death certificates from the Carolinas taken at five year intervals from 1910 to 1975 to the manuscript federal census files of the deceased early in life and then to the death certificates of the deceased's parents. To our knowledge, the data we construct is the first of its kind linking parent and child death certificate information with information from census files, allowing us to construct a panel data set to look at mortality over time and for specific cohorts. We present preliminary evidence from our project and outline several avenues of future research to be investigated with this data.