Tiffany Green, (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Tod Hamilton investigate whether maternal education–infant mortality gradients vary by race/ethnicity and nativity among infants born to mothers in the United States. Their paper “Maternal educational attainment and infant mortality in the United States: Does the gradient vary by race/ethnicity and nativity?” in Demographic Research observed maternal education-infant health gradients and found that they are flatter among foreign-born mothers than U.S.-born mothers. Knowing that common metrics of infant health are less predictive of infant mortality for some racial/ethnic and nativity groups, further study of maternal education-infant mortality gradients was necessary.

Using data from the 1998‒2002 National Vital Statistics Birth Cohort Linked Birth/Infant Death Data published by the National Center for Health Statistics (N = 17,520,140) to estimate logistic regression models predicting infant, neonatal, and postneonatal mortality by race/ethnicity and nativity. They discovered that negative associations between maternal education and infant mortality are stronger for US-born mothers than foreign-born mothers. Among both groups, Non-Hispanic whites have the highest returns to education and Non-Hispanic blacks have the lowest returns. While foreign-born mothers are less likely to have an infant die than their native-born counterparts, this advantage is largest at the lowest levels of education and converges at the highest levels of education. For most racial/ethnic groups, the maternal education–infant mortality gradient is steeper during the postneonatal period than during the neonatal period.

Concluding that the maternal education–infant mortality gradient varies substantially by the timing of infant death, race/ethnicity, and nativity. This study extends the literature on nativity disparities in infant health by documenting how the maternal education-infant mortality gradient varies by nativity within racial/ethnic groups. To their knowledge, this is the first study to produce these estimates.