Understanding Mortality Rate Deceleration and Heterogeneity |
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| Authors: | DAVID R STEINSALTZ KENNETH W WACHTER |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Demography , University of California , Berkeley, California, USA dstein@demog.berkeley.edu;3. Department of Demography , University of California , Berkeley, California, USA |
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| Abstract: | ABSTRACT Generic relationships between heterogeneity in population frailty and flattening of aggregate population hazard functions at extreme ages are drawn from classical mathematical results on the limiting behavior of Laplace transforms. In particular, it shows that the population hazard function converges to a constant precisely when the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity in initial mortalities behaves asymptotically as a polynomial near zero. |
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| Keywords: | frailty heterogeneity biodemography hazard functions Laplace transforms mortality plateaus |
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