The life expectancy of older couples and surviving spouses

被引:9
作者
Compton, Janice [1 ]
Pollak, Robert A. [2 ,3 ,4 ,5 ]
机构
[1] Univ Manitoba, Dept Econ, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
[2] Washington Univ, Dept Econ, St Louis, MO 63130 USA
[3] Washington Univ, Olin Sch Business, St Louis, MO 63110 USA
[4] Natl Bur Econ Res, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
[5] IZA Inst Labor Econ, Bonn, Germany
来源
PLOS ONE | 2021年 / 16卷 / 05期
关键词
POWER COUPLES; UNITED-STATES; MORTALITY; BEHAVIOR; INCOME;
D O I
10.1371/journal.pone.0250564
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
Individual life expectancies provide information for individuals making retirement decisions and for policy makers. For couples, analogous measures are the expected years both spouses will be alive (joint life expectancy) and the expected years the surviving spouse will be a widow or widower (survivor life expectancy). Using individual life expectancies to calculate summary measures for couples is intuitively appealing but yield misleading results, overstating joint life expectancy and dramatically understating survivor life expectancies. This implies that standard "individual life cycle models" are misleading for couples and that "couple life cycle models" must be substantially more complex. Using the CDC life tables for 2010, we construct joint and survivor life expectancy measures for randomly formed couples. The couples we form are defined by age, race and ethnicity, and education. Due to assortative marriage, inequalities in individual life expectancies are compounded into inequalities in joint and survivor life expectancies. We also calculate life expectancy measures for randomly formed couples for the 1930-2010 decennial years. Trends over time show how the relative rate of decrease in the mortality rates of men and women affect joint and survivor life expectancies. Because our couple life expectancy measures are based on randomly formed couples, they do not capture the effects of differences in spouses' premarital characteristics (apart from sex, age, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, education) or of correlations in spouses' experiences or behaviors during marriage. However, they provide benchmarks which have been sorely lacking in the public discourse.
引用
收藏
页数:13
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