UC Berkeley

We are far from a complete understanding of the social determinants of mortality in theUnited States. Despite the longstanding interest in racial and class-based inequalities in health and mortality in the United States, research is often hampered by data limitations. However, new advances in data linkage have allowed mortality researchers to construct ad- ministrative datasets with millions of mortality records and demographic covariates. The unprecedented scale and richness of these administrative datasets allow social scientists to make new discoveries into the contours of mortality disparities in the United States.

This dissertation is comprised of three studies of mortality using large-scale, linked U.S.Census and administrative death records. In my second chapter, I investigate the relationship between owning a home in early adulthood and life expectancy, demonstrating that owning a home in early adulthood has a causal effect on life expectancy. My second study assesses the predictability of individual-level longevity, demonstrating the challenges of predicting individual-level mortality. The final study of the dissertation examines the Black-White crossover, finding evidence that the crossover is not a data artifact and cannot be uncrossed using sociodemographic variables alone.