Black-White Mortality Crossover: New Evidence from Social Security Mortality Records

The Black-White mortality crossover is well-studied demographic paradox. Black Americans experience higher age-specific mortality rates than White Americans throughout most of the life course, but this puzzlingly reverses at advanced ages. The leading explanation for the Black-White mortality crossover centers around selective mortality over the life course. Black Americans who survived higher age-specific mortality risk throughout their life course are highly selected on robustness, and have lower mortality than White Americans in late life. However, skeptics argue the Black-White mortality crossover is simply a data artifact from age misreporting or related data quality issues. We use large-scale linked administrative data (N = 2.3 million) to document the BlackWhite mortality crossover for cohorts born in the early 20 th century. We find evidence the crossover is not a data artifact and cannot be uncrossed using sociodemographic characteristics alone.