Abstract:

With the release of Social Security application (SS-5), claim, and death records,
the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has created a new administrative
data resource for researchers studying mortality. While much progress has
been made in understanding the demographic determinants of mortality in the United
States using survey data, the lack of population-level register data is a barrier to further
advances in mortality research. This publicly available micro-level dataset provides
researchers access to over 49 million mortality records with demographic covariates and
fine geographic detail, allowing for high-resolution mortality research. In this paper,
we document the contents of this dataset, provide access to a cleaned and harmonized
version of the data, and discuss statistical methods for estimating mortality differentials
based on this deaths-only dataset.