Revivorship and life lost to mortality

Carl Schmertmann

Volume 42 - Article 17 | Pages 497–512

Revivorship and life lost to mortality

By Carl Schmertmann

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Date received:	14 Jun 2019
Date published:	12 Mar 2020
Word count:	1000
Keywords:	life left, mortality, revival
DOI:	10.4054/DemRes.2020.42.17
Additional files:	readme.42-17 (text file, 822 Byte)
	demographic-research.42-17 (zip file, 954 kB)
Weblink:	All publications in the ongoing Special Collection 8 "Formal Relationships" can be found at http://www.demographic-research.org/special/8/

Abstract

Background: Some formal demographic models describe mortality improvement in terms of averted deaths. In such models individuals who would have died in an earlier regime are instead revived and returned to the population to face the same age-speciﬁc mortality risks as the rest of the population. A closely related literature has examined inequality in terms of the number of years of potential life that are lost to deaths.

Objective: The paper combines several results from formal demography to illustrate the potential gains in life lived from a sequence of revivals, in which everyone is revived 0, 1, 2,. . . times.

Contribution: Mathematical analysis yields two new results: A generalization of Vaupel and Canudas-Romo’s e† index to second and higher-order revivals, and an analytical expression that relates gains from revivals to the covariance of remaining life expectancy and cumulative mortality.