Preprint:

https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/oster/sites/brown.ed...

When I was a typically paranoid new parent, I researched the odds of both at birth and after birth deaths. I was very surprised by the huge racial differences - a black infant is more than twice as likely to die during the first year than a white or Hispanic infant.

US statistics:

http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/infant-mortality-rate-b...

However, the parent paper's abstract says that the primary difference is economic - yet US hispanics have identical infant death rates to white Americans. Could anyone with access to the paper see if the authors actually for this a stronger correlation than race?

In the conclusion the allude to two areas for improvement: access and prevention.

1) "Our results on neonatal mortality strongly suggest that differential access to technology-intensive medical care provided shortly after birth is unlikely to explain the US IMR disadvantage"

2) "... in general, policy attention should focus on either preventing preterm births or on reducing postneonatal mortality."

That's interesting, I hear people say it's just because of the definitional differences so I'm glad to have learned this.

Because we have failed to decide that that is not acceptable.