NCHS's Vital Statistics Birth Cohort Linked Birth/Infant Death Data, 1983-1991, 1995-2004This page contains the NBER collection of Birth Cohort Linked Birth and Infant Death Data of the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics. The microdata for each year of the Linked Birth/Infant Death Data Set consist of three separate data files. The denominator files (such as Den85.dat.Z) contain all births occuring in a given calendar year. The numerator files (such as Num85.dat.Z) include deaths to all infants born in that same calendar year for which the death certificate can be linked to a birth certificate in the denominator file. The unlinked files (such as Unl85.dat.Z) include death certificate information for all the infant deaths that cannot be linked to a birth in the corresponding birth file. The numerator/denominator set can be used to compute infant mortality rates. Demographic data include variables such as date of birth, age and educational attainment of parents, marital status, live-birth order, race, sex, and geographic area. Health data include items such as birth weight, gestation, prenatal care, attendant at birth, and Apgar score. Geographic data includes state, county, and city of mother's residence and state and county of the place of birth. City and county data are available only for areas with a population of 250,000 or more. Check the documentation below for more detail. Other birth data availble are Natality Data, 1968-2004, Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Data, 1995-2002, as part of the Perinatal Mortality Data, and Matched Multiple Births Data, 1995-1998. *** NCHS did not produce Linked Birth/Infant Death from 1992-1994. After 1999, the Linked Birth/Infant Death data is included as part of the Perinatal Mortality Data set. SEER provides helpful U.S. Population data for 1969 on.
Both ".Z" and ".zip" files can be uncompressed with winzip. In addition, ".Z" files can be uncompressed using the UNIX uncompress command and ".zip" files can be unzipped with pkunzip. To check your ability to uncompress these files, download the small files compress.Z or compress.zip. These files give an example of how to read in .Z and .zip ASCII files into SAS for UNIX without decompressing the files. To download files in Internet Explorer, right click on them and select "Save Target As...".
The 2003 denominator uncompressed file size is greater than 2Gb so use decompression software that can handle it. NBER internal users can access the data from a UNIX shell at /homes/data/lbid or on an NBER PC via Network Neighborhood --> NBER --> home --> data --> lbid
SAS, Stata, SPSS Data Definition FilesThese SAS, Stata, and SPSS files were created by Jean Roth at the NBER to make access to the NCHS' Linked Birth/Infant Death Data easier.* -- Difference between 1985-1987 and 1988 is in the variable at column 37. DOCUMENTATION
To report errors, or if you have comments or suggestions, e-mail jroth@nber.org.
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