Volume 23 - Article 3 | Pages 63–72  

Sensitivity of life disparity with respect to changes in mortality rates

By Peter Wagner

This article is part of the ongoing Special Collection 8 "Formal Relationships"

Abstract

This article is concerned with sensitivity analysis of life disparity with respect to changes in mortality rates. A relationship is derived that describes the effect on life disparity caused by a perturbation of the force of mortality. Recently Zhang and Vaupel introduced a "threshold age", before which averting deaths reduces disparity, while averting deaths after that age increases disparity. I provide a refinement to this result by characterizing the ages at which averting deaths has an extremal impact on life disparity. The results are illustrated using data for the female populations of Denmark in 1835, and for the United States in 2005.

Author's Affiliation

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Dynamics of the coefficient of variation of the age at death distribution
Volume 49 - Article 38    | Keywords: lifespan inequality, mathematical demography, sensitivity analysis, threshold age

On a closed-form expression and its approximation to Gompertz life disparity
Volume 49 - Article 1    | Keywords: entropy, exponential integral functions, life disparity, life table

The sensitivity analysis of population projections
Volume 33 - Article 28    | Keywords: economic support ratio, elasticity, matrix calculus, matrix population models, population projections, sensitivity analysis, Spain

Variance in age at death equals average squared remaining life expectancy at death
Volume 30 - Article 50    | Keywords: life disparity, life table entropy, remaining life expectancy, variance in age at death

Reforging the Wedding Ring: Exploring a Semi-Artificial Model of Population for the United Kingdom with Gaussian process emulators
Volume 29 - Article 27    | Keywords: agent-based computational demography, Gaussian process emulator, multistate models, population dynamics, sensitivity analysis

Cited References: 12

Download to Citation Manager

PubMed

Google Scholar

Volume
Page
Volume
Article ID