Forecasting Educational Differences in Life Expectancy

Frederik Peters, University of Rostock

In this paper, we present an novel approach to forecast LE for different educational groups within a population. As a basic framework we will use the Li-Lee model which has been developed as to coherently forecast mortality for different groups. We adapted this model to distinguish between overall, gender specific and education specific trends in mortality and extrapolated the time-trends in a flexible manner. We illustrate our method for the population above age 65 in the Netherlands. Several data sources spanning different time windows were used to construct time series of mortality by gender, age and education. Our extended Li-Lee model was used to forecast mortality rates and translate them into estimates of LE. Several sensitivity analyses illustrate advantages of our proposed methodology.