nep-dem New Economics Papers
on Demographic Economics
Issue of 2023‒12‒04
three papers chosen by
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas, University of Wisconsin


  1. An overlapping cohorts perspective of lifespan inequality By Héctor Pifarré i Arolas; José C. Andrade Santacruz; Mikko Myrskylä
  2. Look at your old men dying: long-run effect of civil war on mortality By Mikko Myrskylä; Torsten Santavirta
  3. Statistical inference for discrete-time multistate models: asymptotic covariance matrices, partial age ranges, and group contrasts By Daniel C. Schneider

  1. By: Héctor Pifarré i Arolas; José C. Andrade Santacruz (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Mikko Myrskylä (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)
    Abstract: A growing applied literature investigates the levels, trends, causes, and effects of lifespan variation. This work is typically based on measures that combine partial cohort histories into a synthetic cohort, most frequently in a period-life table, or focus on single (completed) cohort analysis. We introduce a new cohort-based method, the overlapping cohorts perspective, that preserves individual cohort histories and aggregates them in a population level measure. We apply these new methods to describe levels and trends in lifespan variation, and to the assessment of temporary and permanent mortality changes in several case studies, including the surge of violent deaths in Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s, and cause-deleted exercises for top mortality causes such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The results from our approach differ from those of existing methods in the timing, trends, and levels of the impact of these mortality developments on lifespan variability, bringing new insights to applied work.
    Keywords: cohort analysis, life tables
    JEL: J1 Z0
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2023-046&r=dem
  2. By: Mikko Myrskylä (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Torsten Santavirta
    Abstract: We study the long-run effect of early adulthood prison camp exposure on mortality using an examiner design and data on 6, 961 former prisoners during the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Our descriptive analysis shows a statistically significant adverse association and a dose response between prison sentence length and old-age mortality. Our instrumental variable design exploits the variation in judge sentence tendency across quasi-randomly assigned judges. We document an effect of sentence length on old-age mortality that is five times larger than the estimated associations. We show that our causal estimates have a local average treatment effect interpretation for the compliers. Keywords: Civil war, Ageing, Mortality, Examiner design
    JEL: J1 Z0
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2023-045&r=dem
  3. By: Daniel C. Schneider (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)
    Abstract: This paper lays out several new asymptotic inference results for discrete-time multistate models. First, it derives asymptotic covariance matrices for the outcome statistics of conditional and/or state expectancies, mean age at first entry, and lifetime risk. It then discusses group comparisons of these outcome measures, which require the calculation of a joint covariance matrix of two or more results. Finally, new procedures are presented for the estimation of multistate models over a partial age range, and how these subrange calculations relate to the result that is obtained from the full age range of the model. All newly derived expressions are compared against bootstrap results in order to verify correctness of results and to assess performance.
    Keywords: multi-state life tables, statistical analysis
    JEL: J1 Z0
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2023-041&r=dem

This nep-dem issue is ©2023 by Héctor Pifarré i Arolas. It is provided as is without any express or implied warranty. It may be freely redistributed in whole or in part for any purpose. If distributed in part, please include this notice.
General information on the NEP project can be found at https://nep.repec.org. For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at <director@nep.repec.org>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand.