Authors: Joseph Price, Britton Davis, Alexander Jenks
Mentors: Joseph Price
Insitution: Brigham Young University
Modern data show a strong positive relationship between community-level average income and life expectancy in the United States. We compile a dataset including place of residence, lifespan, and a proxy for income for 27 million unique individuals from the 1900-1940 censuses. In contrast to the pattern in modern data, we actually find that individuals living in an enumeration district with the top quartile of our proxy for income experienced shorter lifespans than those living in the bottom quartile. We show that this negative relationship was largest in the 1900 census and slowly shrank over the next four decades showing how this negative relationship evolved to the positive relationship we see today.