Working Paper: NBER ID: w21625
Authors: Lisa Cook; Trevon Logan; John Parman
Abstract: Race-specific given names have been linked to a range of negative outcomes in contemporary studies, but little is known about their long term consequences. Building on recent research which documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman 2014), we analyze long-term consequences of distinctively racialized names. Using over three million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina from 1802 to 1970, we find a robust within-race mortality difference for African American men who had distinctively black names. Having an African American name added more than one year of life relative to other African American males. The result is robust to controlling for the age pattern of mortality over time and environmental factors which could drive the mortality relationship. The result is not consistently present for infant and child mortality, however. As much as 10% of the historical between-race mortality gap would have been closed if every black man were given a black name. Suggestive evidence implies that cultural factors not captured by socioeconomic or human capital measures may be related to the mortality differential.
Keywords: African American names; mortality; health outcomes; cultural factors
JEL Codes: I1; J15; N31; N32
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| having a distinctively African American name (J15) | mortality outcomes influenced by cultural factors (I12) |
| having a distinctively African American name (J15) | increased lifespan among African American men (I14) |
| distinctively black names (J15) | infant and child mortality (J13) |
| having a distinctively African American name (J15) | closing the historical between-race mortality gap (I14) |
| distinctively black names (J15) | lifespan (J17) |