Full Citation

Title: Did the Urban Mortality Penalty Disappear? Revisiting the Early Twentieth Century's Urban-Rural Mortality Convergence

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2020

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DOI: 10.18128/MPC2020-09

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Abstract: This paper reexamines the predominant narrative suggesting that urban areas became cleaner, safer, and healthier during the early twentieth century, eliminating the "urban penalty" in mortality by 1920. While canonical narrative holds for crude mortality in select states, we show that in the national panel of counties and cities, or for age-standardized mortality, the urban penalty persists past 1936. We attribute these divergent results to the diierences in population composition by DRA entry and for urban versus rural areas. We then consider why the urban penalty failed to disappear and document two intriguing patterns in respiratory and waterborne-infectious mortality. First, both large and small cities had persistently high waterborne/gastroenteric mortality. Second, large cities struggled with airborne/respiratory deaths, while these respiratory illnesses killed fewer in small cities and rural areas. An interesting caveat to these endings is that tuberculosis mortality quickly converged between urban and rural areas after 1918, suggesting that the 1918 innuenza pandemic may have played a role in narrowing the urban penalty.

Url: https://assets.ipums.org/_files/mpc/wp2020-09.pdf

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Authors: Feigenbaum, James; Hoehn-Velasco, Lauren; Wrigley-Field, Elizabeth

Series Title: MPC Working Paper

Publication Number: 2020-09

Institution: University of Minnesota

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Publisher Location: Minneapolis

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Fertility and Mortality

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