This dataset contains information compiled for a study of the relationship between infant mortality rates and death rates and weather and climate: Price Fishback, Werner Troesken, Trevor Kollmann, Michael Haines, Paul Rhode, and Melissa Thomasson. “Information and the Impact of Climate and Weather on Mortality Rates During the Great Depression.” The Economics of Climate Change, edited by Gary Libecap and Richard Steckel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 131-168. The data cover the years 1930 through 1940 for all counties in the United States. It includes a wealth of information on the economy and New Deal policies. Great care should be exercised in using a number of the variables for other projects in the following sense. Our focus was on the interaction between death rates and weather. For both of these measures we had annual variation. We compiled a number of variables as correlates based on information from the censuses of 1930 and 1940 and from various other sources where there were not observations each year; therefore, we interpolated these variables to have values in the years where they were not reported. In the excel sheet
fishback_variable.listing.and.interpolations.2012.02.05
we give descriptions for each variable and describe the years for which we had data and the form of interpolation between those years. The weather information was reported for a smaller number of weather stations than there were counties, so we used spatial interpolation for that information. The sources for the variables are found in the working paper version of the final published paper in the file
fishback_climate.mortality.fishback.et.al.2013.02.05
Please check
https://econ.arizona.edu/faculty/webpage2_fishback_climate.asp
for the data.
When using the data set, please cite the original paper and the dataset. The paper citation is Price Fishback, Werner Troesken, Trevor Kollmann, Michael Haines, Paul Rhode, and Melissa Thomasson. “Information and the Impact of Climate and Weather on Mortality Rates During the Great Depression.” The Economics of Climate Change, edited by Gary Libecap and Richard Steckel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 131-168. The dataset citation is Price Fishback, Shawn Kantor, Trevor Kollman, Michael Haines, Paul Rhode, and Melissa Thomasson. “Weather, Demography, Economy, and the New Deal at the County Level, 1930-1940.”