Paradox lost: explaining the Hispanic adult mortality advantage

Citation: Palloni, Alberto, Arias, Elizabeth (2004) Paradox lost: explaining the Hispanic adult mortality advantage. Demography (Volume 41) (RSS)
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Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

Palloni and Arias test 3 hypotheses in an attempt to explain the Hispanic mortality paradox in the U.S.:

1. Data artifact -ethnic identification problem -age misreporting -matching deaths to earlier pop records
2. Migration effect -healthy migrant selection -salmon bias effect: return to home country after period of unemployment or illness.
3. Cultural effects They use NHIS and do find mortality advantages for both foreign-born Mexicans and f-b "other Hispanics" over non-Hispanic whites. They find, indirectly, that most of the Mexican f-b mortality advantage occurs due to return migration of adults in poor health.

Palloni and Arias list 5 conclusions:

1. The Hispanic advantage is a misnomer. It really only occurs for f-b Mexicans and f-b "other Hispanic", not including any Puerto Ricans or Cubans.
2. The advantage is not trivial, translating into 5-8 years of additional life expectancy.
3. Salmon-bias has most support.
4. Advantage persists for f-b "other Hispanics" even after controlling for healthy migrant selection.
5. There is no support for the cultural hypothesis.