The IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel (MLP) is a longitudinal population panel that links American censuses, surveys, administrative sources, and vital records spanning the period from 1850 to the present. This article explains the rationale for IPUMS MLP, outlines the design of the infrastructure, and describes the linking methods used to construct the panel. We then detail our plans for expansion and improvement of MLP over the next five years, including the incorporation of additional data sources, the development of a "linkage hub" to connect MLP with other major record linkage efforts, and the refinement of our technology and dissemination efforts. We conclude by describing a few early examples of MLP-based research.

We examine the socioeconomic consequences of discrimination against people of Southern origins during the US Great Migration of the first half of the twentieth century. We ask whether people living in the American North and Midwest in 1940 fared worse with respect to education, occupation, and income if they were perceived to be of Southern origins. We also assess variation in these effects across racial groups and across actual region of origin groups. Using linked data from the 1920 and 1940 US censuses, we compare the life outcomes of about half a million pairs of brothers who differed with respect to the regional origin implied by their first names. For both Whites and Blacks, we find statistically significant associations between outcomes and the regional origin implied by names; regardless of where they were born, men living in the North or Midwest in 1940 did worse if their names implied Southern origins. However, these associations are entirely confounded by family-specific cultural, socioeconomic, and other factors that shaped both family naming practices and life outcomes. This finding - that regional discrimination in the early-twentieth-century United States did not happen based on names - contrasts sharply with findings from research in more recent years that uses names as proxies for people's risk of exposure to various forms of discrimination. Whereas names are a basis for discrimination in modern times, they were not a basis for regional discrimination in an era in which people had more immediate and direct evidence about regional origins.

Childhood malnutrition and its later life effects were important concerns in European and North American social policy in the early twentieth century. However, there have been few studies of the lo...

Introduction: Tobacco 21 (T21) policies have shown promise in reducing cigarette use among adolescents. This study examined whether local T21 policies affected adolescent use of a variety of tobacco products and whether results differed by grade level. Methods: We used repeated cross-sectional data from eighth, ninth, and eleventh-grade respondents to the 2016 (n = 107 981) and 2019 (n = 102 196) Minnesota Student Surveys. Generalized estimating equations modeled eight adolescent tobacco use outcomes in 2019 (past 30-day use of any tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, e-cigarettes, hookah, chewing tobacco, flavored tobacco, and multiple products) by T21 exposure, defined as respondents' attendance at a school within a jurisdiction with T21 policy implementation between the two surveys. Models controlled for demographic characteristics and product-specific baseline tobacco use at the school level in 2016 and were stratified by grade. Results: After adjusting for baseline tobacco use and other demographics, T21-exposed eighth and ninth-grade students had significantly lower odds of tobacco use than unexposed peers in five of eight models, i.e. any tobacco (aOR = 0.80, 95% CI: 0.74, 0.87), cigarettes (aOR = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.99), e-cigarettes (aOR = 0.78, 95% CI: 0.71, 0.85), flavored tobacco (aOR = 0.79, CI: 0.70, 0.89), and dual/poly tobacco (aOR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.65, 0.92). T21-exposed eleventh-grade students did not differ significantly in their odds of any tobacco use outcomes relative to their unexposed peers. Conclusions: T21 exposure is associated with lower odds of multiple forms of tobacco use, particularly among younger adolescent populations, supporting the implementation of T21 policies to reduce tobacco use in this population.

There is considerable evidence that the act of participating in a survey can alter participants' attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes in meaningful ways. Considering findings that this form of panel conditioning also impacts health behaviors and outcomes, we investigated the effect of participating in an intensive half-century-long cohort study on participants’ longevity. To do so, we used data from a 1957 survey of more than 33,000 Wisconsin high school seniors linked to mortality records. One third of those people were selected at random to participate in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS); the other two thirds were never again contacted. Our survival models show no evidence of panel conditioning effects on longevity: People selected at random to participate in the WLS had the same mortality outcomes as their peers who were not selected. This finding holds for the full sample, for women, for men, for population subgroups defined by family socioeconomic origins and educational experiences, and for treatment compliers.

Children require a large amount of time, effort, and resources to raise. Physical help, financial contributions, medical care, and other types of assistance from kin and social network members allow couples to space births closer together while maintaining or increasing child survival. We examine the impact of kin availability on couples’ reproductive success in the early twentieth-century United States with a panel data set of over 3.1 million couples linked between the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses. Our results indicate that kin proximity outside the household was positively associated with fertility, child survival, and net reproduction, and suggest that declining kin availability was an important contributing factor to the fertility transition in the United States. We also find important differences between maternal and paternal kin inside the household—including higher fertility among women residing with their mother-in-law than among those residing with their mother—that support hypotheses related to the contrasting motivations and concerns of parents and parents-in-law.

Does education change people’s lives in a way that delays mortality? Or is education primarily a proxy for unobserved endowments that promote longevity? Most scholars conclude that the former is true, but recent evidence based on Danish twin data calls this conclusion into question. Unfortunately, these potentially field-changing findings—that obtaining additional schooling has no independent effect on survival net of other hard-to-observe characteristics—have not yet been subject to replication outside Scandinavia. In this article, we produce the first U.S.-based estimates of the effects of education on mortality using a representative panel of male twin pairs drawn from linked complete-count census and death records. For comparison purposes, and to shed additional light on the roles that neighborhood, family, and genetic factors play in confounding associations between education and mortality, we also produce parallel estimates of the education-mortality relationship using data on (1) unrelated males who lived in different neighborhoods during childhood, (2) unrelated males who shared the same neighborhood growing up, and (3) non-twin siblings who shared the same family environment but whose genetic endowments vary to a greater degree. We find robust associations between education and mortality across all four samples, although estimates are modestly attenuated among twins and non-twin siblings. These findings—coupled with several robustness checks and sensitivity analyses—support a causal interpretation of the association between education and mortality for cohorts of boys born in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.

This paper examines astrology, a concept that is considered unscientific by broad segments of the population in the western world. Despite this, astrology remains for some an important source for advice regarding choices in a range of different matters, including career and relationships. The continuing popularity of astrology may at least partly be linked to an insufficient body of empirical research that has been able to test hypotheses formulated by astrological theory, both due to a lack of data beyond very small study populations as well as astrological predictions frequently being vague and thereby difficult to test. This article examines how differences in astrological favorability influence partner choice in marriage as well as the divorce risk among married couples using longitudinal individual-level data from Sweden over the period 1968-2001. The results fail to provide any consistent evidence to support the notion that astrologically more compatible couples are either overrepresented among observed marital unions or associated with a lower risk of divorce.

This paper presents a new probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to a range of different sources of historical records. The method was designed to exploit a more comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics present in historical census data, aiming to obtain a machine learning algorithm that better distinguishes between multiple potential matches. Our results demonstrate that the method achieves a match rate that is twice as high other currently popular methods in the literature while at the same time also achieving greater accuracy. In addition, the method only performs negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

Early exiting from the labor force and into disability pension (DP) represents a major social problem in Sweden and elsewhere. We examined how being asymmetric (A-SGA) or symmetric (S-SGA) small for gestational age predicts transitioning into DP. We analyzed a longitudinal sample of 8125 men and women from the Stockholm Birth Cohort (SBC), born in 1953 and not on DP in 1990. The SBC consists of data from various sources, including self-reported information and data from administrative registers. The follow-up period was from 1991 to 2009. Yearly information on the receipt of DP benefits from register data was operationalized as a dichotomous variable. 13 percent of the sample moved into DP during follow-up. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to examine whether disadvantageous fetal growth – A-SGA and S-SGA – predicted DP. Men and women born A-SGA had a substantially increased hazard of DP. The full model suggested a hazard ratio of 1.68 (CI: 1.11–2.54), only being affected slightly by adulthood conditions. Several childhood conditions were also associated with DP. Such factors, however, mainly affected DP risk through adulthood conditions. The effect of SGA on DP appeared particularly strong among individuals from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. The evidence presented suggests that being A-SGA influences the risk of DP, independent of childhood and adulthood conditions, and similarly for men and women. Due to A-SGA being rather infrequent, reducing the occurrence of A-SGA would, however, only have a marginal impact on the stock of DP pensioners. For the individual affected, the elevation in the risk of DP was nevertheless substantial. Other childhood conditions exercised a larger influence on the stock of DP recipients, but they mostly operated through adulthood attainment. The importance of socioeconomic resources in childhood for the long term health consequences of SGA is interesting from a policy perspective and warrants further research.

This study examines the influence of health conditions experienced during the individual's first year of life on the incidence of sickness absence during adulthood. Using a sample of approximately 9000 biological siblings from 17 countries of origin and living in Sweden during the time period 1981-1991, sibling fixed effect models are estimated. This approach is combined with the use of an exogenous measurement of early life conditions, operationalized as the infant mortality rate. The link between early life conditions and later life outcomes is examined both with and without intermediary characteristics observed during the individual's childhood and adulthood, aiming for a better understanding regarding to what extent the effect of exposure to an early life insult can be mediated. The results suggest that exposure to worse health conditions during the first year of life is associated with an elevated risk of experiencing sickness absence during adulthood. An increase in infant mortality rate by ten per thousand is associated with a four percentage point higher probability of experiencing sickness absence. Despite the importance of adulthood socioeconomic status on sickness absence propensity, these factors do not mediate the influence from the health conditions experienced during the first year of life, suggesting that the association from early life conditions on sickness absence in adulthood operates as a direct mechanism. The link between early life conditions and sickness absence is only present for children to parents with primary schooling and not for individuals with more educated parents. These findings suggest that families with more abundant resources have the ability to protect their child from exposure to adverse health conditions during early life, or to cancel out the influence from an early life insult.

BACKGROUND A high prevalence of sickness absence in many countries, at a substantial societal cost, underlines the importance to understand its determining mechanisms. This study focuses on the link between relative deprivation and the probability of sickness absence. METHODS 184,000 men and women in Sweden were followed between 1982 and 2001. The sample consists of working individuals between the ages of 19 and 65. The outcome is defined as experiencing more than 14 days of sickness absence during a year. Based on the complete Swedish population, an individual's degree of relative deprivation is measured through income compared to individuals of the same age, sex, educational level and type. In accounting for the possibility that sickness absence and socioeconomic status are determined by common factors, discrete-time duration models were estimated, accounting for unobserved heterogeneity through random effects. RESULTS The results confirm that the failure to account for the dynamics of the individual's career biases the influence from socioeconomic characteristics. Results consistently suggest a major influence from relative deprivation, with a consistently lower risk of sickness absence among the highly educated. CONCLUSIONS Altering individual's health behavior through education appears more efficient in reducing the reliance on sickness absence, rather than redistributive policies.

The aim of this paper is to study socioeconomic attainment and mobility in a confined geographic area over a period of more than 150 years. More specifically, using longitudinal individual level data from five parishes in southern Sweden, the paper focuses on how patterns of intergenerational social mobility changed from the early 1800s to 1968. In contrast to most previous research we are able to study an uninterrupted time period in which Sweden transformed from a pre-industrial to a mature industrial society. Based on theory and previous research we test different hypotheses linking changing social mobility patterns to the industrialization process by studying trends in two different areas. The analysis provides no uniform support for an immediate connection between industrialization and improved conditions for social mobility (upwards) and entry into the middle class. The chances of upward mobility clearly increased over time, but it is not equally clear that this development was stronger in industrializing areas than in rural ones. Moreover, the change seems to have connected to the period after the industrial breakthrough when Swedish industrial society matured and developed into a welfare state society. Finally, we find only weak support for the hypothesis that more siblings were detrimental to social mobility, and no support at all for the hypotheses that such an effect grew stronger with industrialization.

Diss. Lund: Lunds universitet, 2010.

The 1918 influenza pandemic stands out for its extreme virulence and unusual age pattern of mortality. Here, we aim to elevate a third unusual feature of its course through United States cities to the same level of scientific prominence: the pandemic produced strikingly small racial disparities in mortality, against a backdrop of extreme racial inequality in the era. We provide the most complete account of racial disparities in influenza and pneumonia mortality in U.S. cities in 1918, showing that they were almost uniformly small. We also advance and evaluate four hypotheses as to why racial disparities in the 1918-1919 pandemic were so small relative to those in proximate years. In particular, we assess hypotheses related to socio-demographic characteristics like segregation, city-level implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, racial differences in exposure to the 1918 herald wave, and racial differences in early-life exposures to other influenza strains that could have resulted in differences in immunological vulnerability to the 1918 flu. The results suggest the importance of considering in depth the interactions between the natural history of a particular microbial agent and the social history of the populations it infects.