Hopkins Population Center Virtual Seminar

Description

Joshua Goldstein, the Chancellor's Professor of Demography and director of the Berkeley Population Center at UC Berkeley, will give a talk titled "Life Expectancy Reversals in Low Mortality Populations" for the Hopkins Population Center. The talk will address the implications of temporary shocks like COVID-19 for trends in life expectancy.

Please attend the event by using the Zoom link (Meeting ID: 943 2636 0887).

Abstract:

Behind the steady march of progress toward longer life expectancy, there have been setbacks, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we use an exploratory approach to describe the temporal, age-structured, and geographic aspects of life expectancy reversals. We find that drops in life expectancy are often followed by larger average improvements, which tells us that most reversals are transitory with little long-term influence. The age-structure of mortality decline when life expectancy falls is tilted toward older ages, a pattern that is quite different from the general pattern of mortality improvement. Finally, a geographic analysis shows that mortality reversals are correlated across neighboring countries (like Italy and France, or Canada and the U.S.). These findings are consistent with contagious disease and weather being important causes of life expectancy reversals. We conclude with a brief discussion of implications for formal modeling and forecasting of mortality following such shocks.