Abstract
Racial disparities in life expectancy persist across the United States, but state-level averages can mask important geographic heterogeneity. This paper examines the Black-White life expectancy gap in Wisconsin from 2005 to 2017, disaggregating the state into Milwaukee County, Dane County (Madison), and the rest of the state. Because Milwaukee is home to about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s Black population and exhibits very poor Black mortality outcomes, statewide statistics are heavily influenced by conditions in a single county. This paper constructs abridged life tables by race, sex, geography, and period, validates statewide estimates against prior work, and applies a decomposition exercise that expresses the statewide gap as the sum of geography-specific contributions (population share times local gap), along with a composition term and residual. For males in 2015–2017, Milwaukee accounts for about 70 percent of the 7.9-year statewide gap, and the geographic concentration of Black Wisconsinites in Milwaukee adds roughly 2.6 years to the gap relative to a scenario in which Black and White residents share the same distribution across regions. Counterfactual exercises show that if Black Milwaukeeans had the same age-specific mortality as Black residents in the rest of Wisconsin, the statewide male gap would fall from 7.9 to about 4.2 years. In Dane County, a large male gap (8.5 years) reflects both exceptionally high White life expectancy and evidence of worsening Black male mortality, although the latter is estimated with substantial uncertainty because of the small Black population. Bootstrap confidence intervals quantify this uncertainty and highlight that the strongest and most precisely estimated contribution to the statewide gap arises from Milwaukee’s combination of a concentrated Black population and severe local mortality disadvantage.
- Series: La Follette School Working Paper No. 2026-002
- Author: Jason Fletcher