Mortality of Children and Parental Disadvantage

This paper investigates the underlying influencing factors of the premature death of children, specifically looking at the correlation between mortality risk of children and parental disadvantage at an individual level. Largely due to lack of appropriate data, this issue is not well explored in Australia. This paper tries to fill in the gap by creatively using a unique administrative dataset of FaCSIA, which contains approximately a whole birth cohort of Australian children. The findings indicate that the mortality of children is significantly correlated with several indicators of parental disadvantage, such as Indigenous status, low income, long duration of income support, teenage motherhood, and living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas. This paper discusses how some measures of disadvantage, such as unemployment or income support reliance used in isolation, may underestimate the extent of intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, because children from disadvantaged families are underrepresented in the samples of adults due to their high premature mortality. JEL Classification: J13; C41