Insight into Stagnating Life Expectancy: Analysing Cause of Death Patterns across Socio-economic Groups

This article analyzes the complexity of female longevity improvements. As socio-economic status is found to influence health and mortality, we partition all individuals, at each age in every year, into five socio-economic groups based on an affluence measure that combine an individual’s income and wealth. We identify the particular socio-economic groups that have been driving the standstill for Danish females. Within each socio-economic group, we further analyze the cause of death patterns. The decline in life expectancy for Danish females is present for four out of five subgroups, however with particular large decreases for the low-middle and middle affluence groups. Cancers, smoking related causes, and other diseases particularly contribute to the stagnation. Moreover, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are found to be important for capturing the following catch-up in longevity

Longevity risk and capital markets: the 2021–22 update

This Special Issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics contains 10 contributions to the academic literature all dealing with longevity risk and capital markets. Draft versions of the papers were presented at Longevity 16: The Sixteenth International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conference that was held in Helsingør near Copenhagen on 13-14 August 2021. It was hosted by PerCent at Copenhagen Business School and the Pensions Institute at City, University of London

Lassoing the determinants of retirement

This article uses Danish register data to explain the retirement decision of workers in 1990 and 1998. Many variables might be conjectured to influence this decision such as demographic, socioeconomic, financial, and health related variables as well as all the same factors for the spouse in case the individual is married. In total, we have access to 399 individual specific variables that all could potentially impact the retirement decision. We use variants of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) and the adaptive Lasso applied to logistic regression in order to uncover determinants of the retirement decision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of these estimators in microeconometrics to a problem of this type and scale. Furthermore, we investigate whether the factors influencing the retirement decision are stable over time, gender, and marital status. It is found that this is the case for core variables such as age, income, wealth, and general health. We also point out the most important differences between these groups and explain why these might be present

Lassoing the determinants of retirement

This article uses Danish register data to explain the retirement decision of workers in 1990 and 1998. Many variables might be conjectured to influence this decision such as demographic, socioeconomic, financial, and health related variables as well as all the same factors for the spouse in case the individual is married. In total, we have access to 399 individual specific variables that all could potentially impact the retirement decision. We use variants of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) and the adaptive Lasso applied to logistic regression in order to uncover determinants of the retirement decision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of these estimators in microeconometrics to a problem of this type and scale. Furthermore, we investigate whether the factors influencing the retirement decision are stable over time, gender, and marital status. It is found that this is the case for core variables such as age, income, wealth, and general health. We also point out the most important differences between these groups and explain why these might be present