Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, May 08, 2025
03:00 PM: Workshop with Casey Breen - CenSoc: Public Linked Administrative Mortality Records for Individual-level Research
Room 400
Abstract
In the United States, much has been learned about the determinants of longevity from survey data and aggregated tabulations. However, the lack of large-scale, individual-level administrative mortality records has proven to be a barrier to further progress. In this talk, I give an overview of the CenSoc datasets, which link the complete-count 1940 U.S. Census to Social Security mortality records. These datasets—CenSoc-DMF (N = 4.7 million) and CenSoc-Numident (N = 7.0 million)—primarily cover deaths among individuals aged 65 and older. The size and richness of CenSoc allows investigators to make new discoveries into geographic, racial, and class-based disparities in old-age mortality in the United States. To illustrate the potential of these new datasets, I present findings from my ongoing research on the Black-White mortality crossover. The Black-White mortality crossover is a well-studied demographic paradox. Black Americans experience higher age-specific mortality rates than White Americans throughout most of the life course, but this puzzlingly reverses at advanced ages. The leading explanation for the Black-White mortality crossover centers on selective mortality over the life course. Black Americans who survived higher age-specific mortality risk throughout their life course are highly selected on robustness and have lower mortality than White Americans in late life. However, skeptics argue the Black-White mortality crossover is simply a data artifact from age misreporting or related data quality issues. I use large-scale linked administrative data (N = 2.3 million) to document the Black-White mortality crossover for cohorts born in the early 20th century. I find evidence the crossover is not a data artifact and cannot be uncrossed using sociodemographic characteristics.
About
Casey Breen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and an incoming Assistant Professor in Demography/Sociology at UT-Austin. He completed his Ph.D. in Demography and M.A. in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. His research develops and applies computational and demographic methods to answer questions in population health and inequality. In one line of research, he investigates mortality disparities and dynamics in the United States using large-scale administrative data. A second line of research applies network-based methods and machine learning to estimate key demographic quantities in data-sparse contexts. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Demography, American Journal of Epidemiology, Population and Development Review, Demographic Research, and Population Research and Policy Review, among other outlets.