Mortality Modeling of Partially Observed Cohorts Using Administrative Death Records

Abstract

New advances in data linkage provide mortality researchers with access to administrative datasets with millions of mortality records and rich demographic covariates. Although these new datasets allow for high-resolution mortality research, administrative mortality records often have technical limitations, such as limited mortality coverage windows and incomplete observation of survivors. We describe a method for fitting truncated distributions that can be used for estimating mortality differentials in administrative data. We apply this method to the CenSoc datasets, which link the United States 1940 Census records to Social Security administrative mortality records. Our approach may be useful in other contexts where administrative data on deaths are available. As a companion to the paper, we release the R package gompertztrunc, which implements the methods introduced in this paper.