The Methuselah Effect: The Pernicious Impact of Unreported Deaths on Old Age Mortality Estimates

Dan Black, Yu-Chieh Hsu, Seth G. Sanders, Lynne Steuerle Schofield and Lowell Taylor

No 23574, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine inferences about old age mortality that arise when researchers use survey data matched to death records. We show that even small rates of failure to match respondents can lead to substantial bias in the measurement of mortality rates at older ages. This type of measurement error is consequential for three strands in the demographic literature: (1) the deceleration in mortality rates at old ages, (2) the black-white mortality crossover, and (3) the relatively low rate of old age mortality among Hispanics—often called the “Hispanic paradox.” Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men (NLS-OM) matched to death records in both the U.S. Vital Statistics system and the Social Security Death Index, we demonstrate that even small rates of missing mortality matching plausibly lead to an appearance of mortality deceleration when none exists, and can generate a spurious black-white mortality crossover. We confirm these findings using data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) matched to the U.S. Vital Statistics system, a dataset known as the “gold standard” (Cowper et al., 2002) for estimating age-specific mortality. Moreover, with these data we show that the Hispanic paradox is also plausibly explained by a similar undercount.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-lab
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Dan A. Black & Yu-Chieh Hsu & Seth G. Sanders & Lynne Steuerle Schofield & Lowell J. Taylor, 2017. "The Methuselah Effect: The Pernicious Impact of Unreported Deaths on Old-Age Mortality Estimates," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 54(6), pages 2001-2024, December.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23574.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Methuselah Effect: The Pernicious Impact of Unreported Deaths on Old-Age Mortality Estimates (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23574

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23574

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().