Essays in modelling mortality rates

Document description

This thesis contributes to the existing literature on modelling mortality rates with focus given to the forecasting ability of models and to the value of socio-economic and epidemiological information. It introduces a new extrapolative forecasting model which improves upon the existing extrapolative models in terms of the fit quality and more importantly the forecasting ability. It also develops a dynamic factor model of mortality rates adopted from the economic literature which shows surprisingly good performance when compared to the current mortality models. In chapter 4 the thesis stistically identifies a weakness of the current extrapolative models, namely, the acceleration in mortality improvement occurring since the early 1970s, and the4 inability of current models to sadequately capture this.

The second half of the thesis focuses on socio-economic and epidemiological data and in particular the usefulness of this type of data in helping to explain the changes in mortality rates.