0000000000357983

AUTHOR

Josep Lledó

Abstención sexual durante la Cuaresma en Andalucía a lo largo del siglo XX y su impacto en la estacionalidad de los nacimientos

Durante siglos ha permanecido vigente en las poblaciones católicas un precepto religioso que prohibía las relaciones sexuales durante la Cuaresma. Esta interdicción repercutía en una disminución de concepciones y en un repunte tras dicho periodo, ambos difíciles de detectar porque, en poblaciones que no ejercían un control efectivo de la fecundidad, también se registraba un pico de concepciones durante la primavera. En la actualidad este precepto ha desaparecido como consecuencia de un proceso de erosión que no conocemos suficientemente. Con los datos anonimizados de todas las personas nacidas en Andalucía y supervivientes a 1 de enero de 2003 (n=8.397.206), este trabajo pretende determinar…

research product

Incorporating big microdata in life table construction: A hypothesis-free estimator

Abstract The IT revolution, now more than ever, offers a cheaper and faster way to collect, store, transmit and process data. Detailed microdata of dates of death, migration and birth are already becoming available for general populations. In this paper, we develop within the family of period-based estimators a new, assumption-free estimator for constructing life tables. The estimator proposed exploits all the detailed data available and is free of the theoretical inconsistencies that the estimators currently used by most official statistical agencies have. We compute the proposed estimator for a real database and test the suitability of the hypotheses on which the estimators used so far re…

research product

The Level of Mortality in Insured Populations

In the actuarial field, life tables are used in reserving and pricing processes. They are commonly built from aggregate data and incorporate margins as a prudent measure to ensure the insurance company’s viability. Solvency II requires insurance companies to calculate technical provisions using best-estimate assumptions for future experience (mortality, expenses, lapses, etc) to separate (i) the risk-free component from (ii) adverse deviation of claims. Nowadays, however, the methods used by insurance companies (in most countries, included Spain) do not guarantee that these components can be separated. Many companies build their own tables from general insured population life tables, assumi…

research product

Introducing migratory flows in life table construction

The purpose of life tables is to describe the mortality behav iour of particular groups. The construction of general life tables is based on death statis tics and census figures of resident populations under the hypothesis of closed demographic sys tem. Among other assumptions, this hypothesis implicitly assumes that entries (immigrants) a nd exits (emigrants) of the population are usually not significant (being almost of the same magnitu de for each age compensating each other). This paper theoretically extends the classical sol ution to open demographic systems and studies the impact of this hypothesis in constructing a life table. In particular, using the data of residential variations m…

research product

Estimation of the Combined Effects of Ageing and Seasonality on Mortality Risk: An Application to Spain

Abstract Despite the overwhelming evidence that shows the persistence of intra-annual variations on demographic events (deaths, birth dates and migration flows), life tables are computed and provided on an annual basis. This paper develops a new estimator for estimating sub-annual death rates that, considering the exact moment of occurrence (exact age and day) of events, concurrently accounts for ageing and calendar fluctuations. This paper also shows how modelling the intra-annual variations of death rates, through specific seasonal–ageing indexes, can be used as a tool for constructing new sub-annual tables from annual tables. This new methodology is exemplified using a real database of S…

research product

Data granularity in mid-year life table construction

[EN] Life tables have a substantial influence on both public pension systems and life insurance policies. National statistical agencies construct life tables from death rate estimates (𝑚���𝑥���), or death probabilities (𝑞���𝑥��� ), after applying various hypotheses to the aggregated figures of demographic events (deaths, migrations and births). The use of big data has become extensive across many disciplines, including population statistics. We take advantage of this fact to create new (more unrestricted) mortality estimators within the family of period-based estimators, in particular, when the exposed-to-risk population is computed through mid-year population estimates. We use actual d…

research product

Assessing implicit hypotheses in life table construction

AbstractMortality figures are of capital importance for policy-making and public planning, as in forecasting financial provisions in public pension systems. General population life tables are constructed from aggregated statistics, an issue that usually entails adopting some (implicit) assumptions in their construction, such as the hypothesis of closed demographic system or the hypotheses of uniform distributions of death counts (and migration events) by age and calendar year. As microdata have become more abundant and reliable, these hypotheses could be assessed and more assumption-free estimators employed. Using a real database from Spain, we show that the above hypotheses are not appropr…

research product