Linked Birth/Infant Death Period Data
This page contains the NBER collection of Period 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 contain all births occuring in a given calendar year. The numerator files include deaths to all infants in that same calendar year for which the death certificate can be linked to a birth certificate in the denominator file. The unlinked files 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 Birth Cohort Linked Birth and Infant Death Data, Natality Data, as part of the Perinatal Mortality Data, and Matched Multiple Births Data, 1995-1998. 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.
Use of this data signifies agreement with NCHS data use rules. Works referring to the datasets or codebooks should contain a citation to NCHS. Published material derived from this data should include a citation such as this at the bottom of the table: "Source: National Center for Health Statistics (span of years used)" |
The ".zip" files can be uncompressed with winzip. To check ability to uncompress these files, download the small file 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...".
U.S. Data
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/linkpe or on an NBER PC via Network Neighborhood --> NBER --> home --> data --> linkpe
SAS, Stata, SPSS Data Definition Files
These SAS, Stata, and SPSS files were created by data@nber.org at the NBER to make access to the NCHS Linked Birth/Infant Death Data easier to use.Standard Death Certificate | ||||||||||||||||||
Standard Birth Certificate |
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Contact data@nber.org with questions, comments, or suggestions.
Last Update: November 23, 2015 | Created by Jean Roth August 10, 2000 |