Intergenerational transmission of child mortality in the Netherlands

This paper shows that there is an intergenerational transmission of child death concentration, which is not (solely) explained by socioeconomic status of families. But inequalities accumulated, as child mortality was highest for low-SES children whose parents originated from high-mortality, low-socioeconomic status families. Intergenerational transmission in child mortality persisted even when child mortality had declined in the early 20^th century.

There are more families with 0 child deaths and many child deaths (filled line) than would be expected with a random distribution of child deaths (dotted line), and fewer families with a relatively low number of deaths. Together this shows that a small number of families experiences a large number of deaths. In the paper, I show that there is an intergenerational component to this phenomenon: surviving children of high-mortality families also experience more child deaths.

Data: LINKS Zeeland is available at the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, here.

Replication code: here