Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerungsdynamik und Nachhaltiges Wohlbefinden

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Formal and Statistical Approaches to the Study of Inequalities in Mortality

Ugofilippo Basellini, Ana Cristina Gómez Ugarte Valerio, Emilio Zagheni, Jose Manuel Aburto (MPIDR / University of Oxford, Vereinigtes Königreich von Großbritannien und Nordirland); in Zusammenarbeit mit Carlo Giovanni Camarda (French National Institute for Demographic Studies, Paris, Frankreich), Fanny Janssen (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, The Hague, Niederlande), Jesus Daniel Zazueta Borboa (University of Oxford, Vereinigtes Königreich von Großbritannien und Nordirland), Marco Bonetti , Andrea Nigri (beide: MPIDR)

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Formal demographic relationships and statistical methods have long been the subject of significant interest from demographers, actuaries, and statisticians, who have laid the rigorous foundations upon which demography is based. Formal and statistical demography remain active areas of research today, as advances in these fields play a fundamental role in the progress of population science.

In this project, we develop and introduce new formal demographic relationships and statistical methods that can provide novel insights into the study of health disparities. We focus in particular on: (i) investigating new relationships between life expectancy and lifespan equality; (ii) monitoring and comparing changes in lifespan equality across countries, time, and cohorts; and (iii) analyzing mortality inequalities across socioeconomic groups, space, and time.

The development of novel formal relationships sheds light on patterns of mortality inequalities. For example, we have shown in one study that life expectancy and lifespan equality are not independent of each other, but instead have a long-term dynamic relationship that governs their joint behavior (Aburto et al. 2020). In another study, we introduced the Drewnowski index for the study of lifespan equality across time and space. We detailed the mathematical relationships related to the threshold age (the age separating positive versus negative contributions to lifespan equality), and showed how changes in equality over time relate to changes in life expectancy (Aburto et al. 2022). A further study focused on the Italian longevity transition by analyzing the contributions of specific causes of death to the changes in life expectancy and lifespan inequality. Our findings indicate that cardiovascular diseases and neoplasms have contributed to the latest increase in life expectancy, but not necessarily to the decrease in lifespan inequality (Nigri et al. 2022). 

More recent work has focused on two separate areas. First, we introduced a novel mortality indicator for the study of mortality patterns and lifespan inequality, refining Vaupel and Canudas-Romo’s e-dagger measure to allow for meaningful comparisons across countries and over time. Specifically, we found that normalized lifespan inequality declined over time until the 1950s, when, in contrast to traditional indicators, it reversed its trend (Bonetti et al. 2024). Second, we analyzed the contribution of educational expansion to longevity trends in England and Wales, Finland, and Italy (Turin) from 1975 to 2015. Our results show that educational expansion has contributed not only to increasing life expectancy, but also to decreasing lifespan inequality (Zazueta Borboa et al. 2025).

Verschiedene Szenarien der Gleichheit der Lebenserwartung (gemessen durch den Drewnowski-Index) und der Altersschwellen nach dem Gompertz-Modell

Gompertz-Sterblichkeitsmodell mit positiver Alterung (ß > 0) für verschiedene Niveaus der Ausgangssterblichkeit a und eine feste Alterungsrate ß = 0,1. In diesem Rahmen nehmen die Gleichheit der Lebensspanne (D) und das Schwellenalter (aD) zu, wenn das Sterblichkeitsniveau (a) sinkt. © Aburto et al. (2022) © MPIDR

Publikationen

Gómez Ugarte Valerio, A. C.; Basellini, U.; Camarda, C. G.; Janssen, F.:

The impact of education misreporting on education-specific mortality and educational inequalities in mortality: a scenario-based study

Population Studies, 1–17. (2026)    

Zazueta Borboa, J.-D.; Basellini, U.; Zagheni, E.; van Wissen, L.; Martikainen, P.; Janssen, F.:

The contribution of educational expansion to trends in life expectancy and lifespan variation in England and Wales, Finland, and Italy (Turin)

Demography 62:5, 1689–1715. (2025)    

Bonetti, M.; Basellini, U.; Nigri, A.:

The Average Uneven Mortality index: building on the 'e-dagger' measure of lifespan inequality

Demographic Research 50:44, 1281–1300. (2024)    

Gómez Ugarte Valerio, A. C.; Basellini, U.; Camarda, C. G.; Janssen, F.; Zagheni, E.:

Reassessing socioeconomic inequalities in mortality via distributional similarities

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2024-007. (2024)    

Gómez Ugarte Valerio, A. C.; Garcia-Guerrero, V. M.:

Inequality crossroads of mortality: socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy and life span in Mexico between 1990 and 2015

Population Research and Policy Review 42:57, 1–22. (2023)    

Aburto, J. M.; Basellini, U.; Baudisch, A.; Villavicencio, F.:

Drewnowski’s index to measure lifespan variation: revisiting the Gini coefficient of the life table

Theoretical Population Biology 148, 1–10. (2022)    

Nigri, A.; Aburto, J. M.; Basellini, U.; Bonetti, M.:

Evaluation of age-specific causes of death in the context of the Italian longevity transition

Scientific Reports 12:22624, 1–10. (2022)    

Aburto, J. M.; Villavicencio, F.; Basellini, U.; Kjærgaard, S.; Vaupel, J. W.:

Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117:10, 5250–5259. (2020)