Missing Children: Indirect Estimation of Child Mortality from Census Microdata on Age Gaps between Surviving Children

Joshua R. Goldstein, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Ester Gonzales-Prieto, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Jutta Gampe, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

In this paper, we develop a new method of inferring child mortality from the age gaps between surviving children. Based on the idea that higher child mortality produces an increased frequency of large gaps between surviving children, we use microsimulation to estimate the mortality rates implied by the observed distribution of age gaps. Application to populations with known child mortality shows that the method can reproduce well the estimates and differentials in child mortality seen in real populations. We hope that estimates of child mortality from census-like data could be a valuable new addition to the toolkit of demographers, opening up a set of rich applications to the proliferation of historical census data in the IPUMS, NAPP, and, new, Mosaic projects. The method also could improve fertility estimation by providing internal estimates of mortality to be used with own-child fertilty estimation.