Laboratory

Population Health

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Spatial Inequalities in Health and Mortality

Mikko Myrskylä, Yana Catherine Vierboom, Marcus Ebeling; in Collaboration with Samuel H. Preston (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA)

Detailed Description

One of the major stories of the 20^th century has been the remarkable and steady increase in life expectancy, driven first by declines in infant and child mortality and later by declines in mortality at advanced ages. However, these improvements, typically documented at the national level, obscure important urban-rural differences in population health improvements and more general regional disparities in life expectancy. Regional variations in population health are driven by factors such as regional differences in the rates of economic development, the socioeconomic characteristics of the constituent populations of each region, local health systems, and legislative differences between regions in federal systems of government.

In recent years, spatial variation in population health has received increasing attention. For example, researchers have highlighted the stark regional differences in the geographic distribution of the opium epidemic in the United States, and the media is also rampant with speculation about the extent to which regional disparities in health are linked to the political turbulence observed in Western Democracies since the Great Recession in 2008.

This project studies regional variation in mortality from all causes combined as well as cause-specific mortality. We apply decomposition and regression methods to estimate the contributions of different causes of death to changes and inequalities in measures of life expectancy.

Publications

Ebeling, M.; Rau, R.; Sander, N.; Kibele, E. U. B.; Klüsener, S.:

Urban‑rural disparities in old‑age mortality vary systematically with age: evidence from Germany and England & Wales

Public Health 205, 102–109. (2022)    

Stelter, R.; Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:

Representativeness is crucial for inferring demographic processes from online genealogies: evidence from lifespan dynamics

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119:10, e2120455119–e2120455119. (2022)    

Stelter, R.; De la Croix, D.; Myrskylä, M.:

Leaders and laggards in life expectancy among European scholars from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century

Demography 58:1, 111–135. (2021)    

Stelter, R.; De la Croix, D.; Myrskylä, M.:

Leaders and laggards in life expectancy among European scholars from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2020-030. (2020)    

Vierboom, Y. C.; Preston, S. H.:

Life beyond 65: changing spatial patterns of survival at older ages in the United States, 2000-2016

Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 75:5, 1093–1103. (2020)    

Vierboom, Y. C.; Preston, S. H.; Hendi, A. S.:

Rising geographic inequality in mortality in the United States

SSM-Population Health 9:100478, 1–14. (2019)