Volume 27 - Article 13 | Pages 365-376

How life expectancy varies with perturbations in age-specific mortality


Date received:	13 Oct 2011
Date published:	04 Sep 2012
Word count:	1600
Keywords:	life expectancy, mortality, pace of aging, perturbation
DOI:	10.4054/DemRes.2012.27.13
Weblink:	All publications in the ongoing Special Collection 8 "Formal Relationships" can be found at http://www.demographic-research.org/special/8/

Abstract

Background: A naturally arising question in demography is how a given change in mortality affects life expectancy. Scholars have targeted this question with different aims and from different perspectives.

Objective: We present and prove the central relationship between change in mortality and resulting change in e0, and we systematically apply it to investigate the effect of specific mortality perturbations.

Comments: Expressions for the change in e_0 resulting from a change in the parameters of the standard parametric mortality model in demography, the Gompertz-Makeham model, include well-known demographic quantities, which might prove useful for future studies.

Author's Affiliation

Tomasz Wrycza - Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany [Email]
Annette Baudisch - Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany [Email]