Post-War Migration Flows and Disparities in Mortality from Age 50 on: The Case of Turin in Italy

Virginia Zarulli, Max Planck Odense Center

Compositional changes due to internal migration affect socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. Despite the importance of these inequalities, there is still little empirical evidence on this effect. This paper investigates whether post-war internal migration in Italy affected the pattern of mortality inequality by socioeconomic status, from age 50 onwards, in the important industrial city of Turin, where many low educated individuals from the South migrated. Migrants might be healthier because of the healthy migrant effect. However, lowly educated individuals have heavier jobs, thus undergoing a faster health selection due to exposure to higher mortality risk. I hypothesized that the interplay of these mechanisms has reduced the unobserved heterogeneity in survival chances of the population, and that this process affected men more than women. The results show that women have higher level of heterogeneity in susceptibility to death and wider differentials mortality by education level than men, which both support the hypotheses.