Economic Opportunity and Race-Sex Specific Mortality: Evidence From U.S. Localities

Rourke O'Brien , University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tiffany Neman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Atheendar Venkataramani, University of Pennsylvania

Recent studies have identified economic opportunity as a key determinant of population health. This work exploits newly available measures of intergenerational economic mobility to examine how spatial variation in the upward mobility prospects of children born to low-income families maps on to variation in health outcomes. We extend this literature by pairing new estimates of race- and gender-specific intergenerational economic mobility rates by Chetty et al. (2018) with race- and gender-specific mortality rates at the level of the commuting zone. We then regress race-sex specific age-adjusted all cause mortality on the race-sex specific economic mobility measure across U.S. commuting zones, adjusting for a vector of local area economic characteristics. We go on to examine how change in the race-sex specific mortality rates over time varies as a function of the local area level of economic opportunity.

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 Presented in Session 235. Social Aspects of Place and Health