Palloni Alberto, Novak Beatriz
Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Center for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies, El Colegio de Mexico Professor.
Vienna Yearb Popul Res. 2016;14:187-227. doi: 10.1553/populationyearbook2016s187.
In this paper, we use new models to convert subjective expectations elicited from individual responses into conditional survival functions. We also estimate the effects of individual characteristics and assess the impact of health shocks on individual updates of subjective expectations. We use Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data from 1992 to 2006. By and large, our results confirm past empirical findings, but also identify patterns not documented in previous research. We show that the subjective probabilities are remarkably close to the results of actual life tables constructed from observed data, that whites underestimate their survival chances more than blacks, that women underestimate their survival chances more than men, and that the subjective underestimation of conditional survival increases with age in all population subgroups. We find significant differences in the survival outlooks of the original HRS cohort and a more recent HRS cohort (1992 versus 2004). These differences persist after introducing suitable controls. The observed mortality differentials between smokers and non-smokers, obese and non-obese individuals, and high-education and low-education groups are quite close to those of these subgroups' subjective survival expectations. Finally, we find large updating effects that result from recent health shocks on subjective expectations.
在本文中，我们使用新模型将从个体回答中得出的主观期望转化为条件生存函数。我们还估计个体特征的影响，并评估健康冲击对主观期望个体更新的影响。我们使用了1992年至2006年的健康与退休研究（HRS）数据。总体而言，我们的结果证实了过去的实证发现，但也识别出了先前研究中未记录的模式。我们表明，主观概率与根据观察数据构建的实际生命表结果非常接近，白人比黑人更低估自己的生存机会，女性比男性更低估自己的生存机会，并且在所有人口亚组中，条件生存的主观低估都随着年龄的增长而增加。我们发现原始HRS队列和较新的HRS队列（1992年与2004年）的生存前景存在显著差异。在引入适当的控制变量后，这些差异仍然存在。吸烟者与非吸烟者、肥胖者与非肥胖者以及高学历与低学历群体之间观察到的死亡率差异与这些亚组的主观生存期望相当接近。最后，我们发现近期健康冲击对主观期望产生了很大的更新效应。
