U.S. City Vital Statistics, 1915–1938

A city-level panel of deaths by cause, reported annually.

For some cities, deaths are reported separately for white and non-white decedents. A disease codebook maps the reported causes of death to the variables.

• U.S. Census Bureau, Mortality Statistics (annual reports).

The source tabulates transcripts of death certificates from the death registration area. In 1918 the registration area comprised 30 states, the District of Columbia and 27 cities in non-registration states. States and cities enter the registration area over time, so the panel is unbalanced.

All files are in the openICPSR project, version V1.

Variable names, labels and units are documented in codebook.docx, distributed with the data on openICPSR.

Please cite the openICPSR project:

@misc{janas_city_vital_statistics,
  author    = {Janas, Pawel},
  title     = {{U.S.} City Vital Statistics, 1915--1938},
  publisher = {Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor]},
  address   = {Ann Arbor, MI},
  year      = {2024},
  version   = {V1},
  doi       = {10.3886/E207222V1},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.3886/E207222V1}
}

Earlier versions remain available on openICPSR.