RESUMO
This paper describes the creation of the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database (LIFE-M), a new data resource linking vital records and decennial censuses for millions of individuals and families living in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. This combination of records provides a life-course and intergenerational perspective on the evolution of health and economic outcomes. Vital records also enable the linkage of women, because they contain a crosswalk between women's birth (i.e., "maiden") and married names. We describe (1) the data sources, coverage, and linking sequence; (2) the process and supervised machine-learning methods to linking records longitudinally and across generations; and (3) the resulting linked samples, including linking rates, representativeness, and weights.
RESUMO
We ask whether mortality from historical pandemics has any predictive content for mortality in the Covid-19 pandemic. We find strong persistence in public health performance. Places that performed worse in terms of mortality in the 1918 influenza pandemic also have higher Covid-19 mortality today. This is true across countries as well as across a sample of large US cities. Experience with SARS in 2003 is associated with slightly lower mortality today. We discuss some socio-political factors that may account for persistence including distrust of expert advice, lack of cooperation, over-confidence, and health care supply shortages. Multi-generational effects of past pandemics may also matter.
