Perozek Maria
Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Mail Stop 97, 20th and C Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20551, USA.
Demography. 2008 Feb;45(1):95-113. doi: 10.1353/dem.2008.0010.
Old-age mortality is notoriously difficult to predict because it requires not only an understanding of the process of senescence-which is influenced by genetic, environmental, and behavioral factors-but also a prediction of how these factors will evolve. In this paper I argue that individuals are uniquely qualified to predict their own mortality based on their own genetic background, as well as environmental and behavioral risk factors that are often known only to the individual. Given this private information, individuals form expectations about survival probabilities that may provide additional information to demographers and policymakers in their challenge to predict mortality. From expectations data from the 1992 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I construct subjective, cohort life tables that are shown to predict the unusual direction of revisions to U.S. life expectancy by gender between 1992 and 2004: that is, for these cohorts, the Social Security Actuary (SSA) raised male life expectancy in 2004 and at the same lowered female life expectancy, narrowing the gender gap in longevity by 25% over this period. Further, although the subjective life expectancies for men appear to be roughly in line with the 2004 life tables, the subjective expectations of women suggest that female life expectancies estimated by the SSA might still be on the high side.
老年死亡率极难预测，因为这不仅需要了解衰老过程（衰老过程受遗传、环境和行为因素影响），还需要预测这些因素将如何演变。在本文中，我认为个体基于自身的遗传背景以及通常只有个体自己知道的环境和行为风险因素，有独特的资格来预测自己的死亡率。鉴于这些私人信息，个体形成关于生存概率的预期，这可能会在人口统计学家和政策制定者预测死亡率的挑战中为他们提供额外信息。根据1992年健康与退休研究（HRS）的预期数据，我构建了主观的队列生命表，这些生命表显示出能够预测1992年至2004年间美国按性别划分的预期寿命修订的异常方向：也就是说，对于这些队列而言，社会保障精算师（SSA）在2004年提高了男性预期寿命，同时降低了女性预期寿命，在此期间将长寿方面的性别差距缩小了25%。此外，虽然男性的主观预期寿命似乎大致与2004年的生命表相符，但女性的主观预期表明，SSA估计的女性预期寿命可能仍然偏高。
