Borrowing a bit from the author Yuval Harari − death is a chaos not particularly influenced by predictions made about it. This paper examines the non-stationarity of aggregate U.S. age standardized all cause mortality rates over the period 1968-2021. Both univariate and state-level panel unit root tests confirm that the underlying stochastic process generating U.S. mortality rates changes over time. Examining non-stationary death in the aggregate, controlling for age and population, establishes proper context to scrutinize the usefulness of the idiom ‘excess death’.
Keywords: Panel Data, Unit Root, age standardized death rates, excess death
