Different estimation methods produce diverging accounts of racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality in the United States. The CDC's decision to present the racial/ethnic distribution of COVID-19 deaths at the state level alongside re-weighted racial/ethnic population distributions -- in effect, a geographic adjustment -- makes it seem that Whites have the highest death rates. Age adjustment procedures used by others, including the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, lead to the opposite conclusion that Blacks and Hispanics are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than Whites. In this paper, we use indirect standardization methods to adjust per-capita death rates for both age and geography simultaneously, avoiding the one-sided adjustment procedures currently in use. Using CDC data, we find age-and-place- adjusted COVID-19 death rates are 80% higher for Blacks and more than 50% higher for Hispanics, relative to Whites, on a national level, while there is almost no disparity for Asians. State-specific estimates show wide variation in mortality disparities. Comparison with non- epidemic mortality reveals potential roles for pre-existing health disparities and differential rates of infection and care.

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The Great Plains drought of 1931–1939 was a prolonged socio-ecological disaster with widespread impacts on society, economy, and health. While its immediate impacts are well documented, we know much less about the disaster’s effects on distal human outcomes. In particular, the event’s effects on later life mortality remain almost entirely unexplored. Closing this gap would contribute to our understanding of the long-term effects of place-based stress. To help fill this gap, I use a new, massive, linked mortality dataset to investigate whether young men’s exposure to drought and dust storms in 341 Great Plains counties was linked to a higher risk of death in early-old age. Contrary to expectations, results suggest exposure to drought conditions had no obvious adverse effect among men aged 65 years or older at time of death—rather, the average age at death was slightly higher than for comparable men without exposure. This effect also appears to have been stronger among Plainsmen who stayed in place until the drought ended. A discussion of potential explanations for these counterintuitive results is provided.

ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to analyze differences in the employment and wage trajectories of college-educated young workers in the United States, as distinguished by the timing of their entry into the labor market relative to the onset of the 2008–09 recession.Methods and findingsUsing annual American Community Survey microdata, we analyzed the first six years of employment and wage outcomes for cohorts of young workers on traditional-student pathways entering the market (1) in 2006, shortly before recession onset; (2) in 2009, during the recession; and (3) in 2012, three years after the recession officially ended. We found evidence for negative effects on outcomes and outcome trajectories differentiated by the recession’s proximity to workers’ labor market entry, including lower wages for the cohort entering in 2009. However, recession effects tended to be smaller for workers at the high end of the education gradient or with no direct exposure to the recession and were outweighed by gendered labor outcome disparities. We also observed a possibly enduring, recession-induced rise in the number of idle young males and the proportion of male and female high school graduates enrolled in college and not working.ConclusionsCohort differences in labor outcomes show that the disadvantages of entering the labor market during an economic downturn appear lasting. However, the subordinate role of timing effects in sorting young workers’ employment and wage rates, when compared to the stark stratification of employment and wage outcomes by education or sex, is a useful reminder that these latter social structures remain key determinants of labor outcomes.