Maternal Cohort Measures of Child Mortality

Adam Storeygard, Brown University

Demographers have long noted that fertility patterns look different from period and cohort perspectives. However, despite the fact that child mortality is often considered to play an important role in determining fertility, little work has been done to distinguish maternal cohort from period patterns in childhood mortality. In this paper I contrast time patterns of child mortality generated from a more traditional child cohort perspective (similar to period rates) with those generated from a maternal cohort perspective for a wide variety of developing countries. Using data from 139 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), I document a wide variety of contrasting patterns across countries.