Drivers of Mortality Dynamics: Identifying Age/Period/Cohort Components of Historical U.S. Mortality Improvements

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to obtain an Age/Period/Cohort (A/P/C) decomposition of historical U.S. mortality improvement. Two different routes to achieving this goal are considered. In the first route, the desired components are obtained by fitting an A/P/C model directly to historical mortality improvement rates. In the second route, an A/P/C model is estimated to historical crude death rates and the desired components are then obtained by differencing the estimated model parameters. For each route, various possible A/P/C model structures are experimented, and are evaluated on the basis of their robustness to several factors (e.g., changes in the calibration window) and their ability to exp..