How do longevity gains translate into the duration and quality of retirement in the United States? Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study and applying a multiple multistate life table approach, we jointly model transitions in labor force participation, disability, depression, and mortality to estimate quality retirement expectancy: the expected time spent in retirement free from disability and depression at age 55. Women live and retire longer than men, but a smaller share of their retirement is spent with quality (63.7% vs. 69.4% in 2010–2019). Racial, ethnic, and nativity disparities are pronounced: Hispanics and the foreign-born have 2–4 more total years of retirement than non-Hispanic Whites and the native-born, but much of this advantage is offset by poorer health during retirement. Conversely, non-Hispanic Black adults face the dual disadvantage of shorter retirement expectancy and limited time in good quality after retirement. These findings highlight unequal returns to longevity and underscore the need for policies promoting healthy and equitable aging.

Internal migration has been fundamental to American culture and economic growth, yet its relationship with population health remains understudied. While international migrants show longevity advantages in most contemporary societies, it has been unclear whether internal migrants also live longer than nonmigrants. Using newly available population data with over 12 million individual death records for cohorts born between 1912 and 1930, we find that 71% of Americans died outside their birth county. Internal migrants had a substantial mortality advantage over stayers —in magnitude equivalent to 10–20 years of mortality improvement for the total US population. This advantage persists even when comparing siblings and controlling for both origin and destination characteristics. Longer-distance moves are associated with greater longevity advantages. We find evidence of place effects from both the origin and destination, with county of destination being more important than county of origin. However, most of the observed migrant mortality advantage seems to be attributable to selection mechanisms. We also demonstrate that internal migration increased geographic mortality disparities: county-level inequality in longevity was 20% higher for men and 28% higher for women when measured by place of death compared to place of birth. 

This study examines the postwar mortality impacts of WWII in 12 high-income countries. Using the Human Mortality Database, we quantify wartime exposure through excess mortality during 1939–1945 and examine its relationship with postwar mortality. Commensurate with their differential exposure to wartime mortality and violence, we find effects primarily among men, and women experienced minimal impacts across most countries. Men in high-exposure countries experienced considerable postwar lifetime losses; in contrast, those in countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland were unaffected. A consequential portion of WWII effects on mortality happened after 1945: for men born in 1920–1925 in combat or occupied countries, 10–22% of war-related life expectancy losses were attributable to postwar effects. Among WWII survived cohorts in the countries we are able to examine, Finnish men born in 1920 suffered the highest postwar lifetime lost due to the war, around 0.9 years. Aggregating these losses across cohorts, we estimate a total of 3.3 million person-year losses attributable to postwar effects for US men, followed by 2.4 million for Italy, 1.8 million for France, 1.5 million for England and Wales, and over 0.4 million for Finland and the Netherlands. These findings reveal the hidden demographic toll persisting after catastrophic events.

There has been considerable interest among social science researchers in understanding the health and longevity disparities between immigrants and nonimmigrants. An emerging literature has highlighted that the health of immigrants varies by immigrant characteristics such as socioeconomic status and country of origin. Despite these insights, one aspect that remains underexplored is how citizenship status may influence immigrants’ health. To address this gap, we examine the effects of citizenship status on the longevity of immigrants and their children for immigrants who lived in early-20th-century America. Using a novel dataset that links Social Security Administration death records (1975–2005) to full-count U.S. census (1920–1940), we find that naturalization increased longevity for first- and second-generation immigrant men. Citizenship increased foreign-born men’s longevity by 7.5 months, and fathers’ citizenship increased sons’ longevity by 4.1 months. For sons, their fathers’ socioeconomic status and own socioeconomic achievement in early adulthood partly explained the effects of father’s citizenship status. Earlier naturalization is associated with greater longevity benefits. These findings underscore the importance of the timing of citizenship acquisition for long-term immigrant health.

Research indicates a significant slowdown in US life expectancy growth post-2010, marking a departure from the consistent longevity progress throughout the twentieth century. We extend this understanding, tracing the deceleration of US life expectancy back to the 1950s, after which the average decadal change dropped from 3.80 to 1.61 years. Surprisingly, these mid-twentieth-century shifts were consistent across race and sex in the United States as well as in other high-income countries. Using a simple approach of quantifying potential life expectancy gains through eliminating age-specific mortality, we find that, the role of reducing midlife mortality in life expectancy has been more significant in the United States than in other countries since 1900. The findings suggest that US life expectancy is unlikely to progress at the high speed observed between 1900 and 1950s, with future advancements hinging on the reduction of old-age mortality, particularly from cardiovascular and mental and nervous system diseases. 

At older ages, most people are supported by pension systems that provide payments based on prior contributions. An important, but neglected, aspect of inequality in how much people receive in pensions is the number of years they live to receive their pension. We examine inequality in lifetime-accumulated pensions and show the importance of mortality for understanding inequalities in pension payments, and contrast it to inequalities in working-age earnings and yearly pension payments among older adults. In contrast to most previous research on old-age inequality comparing different social groups, we focused on total-population-level inequality. Using Swedish register data covering the retired population born from 1918–1939, we found that lifetime pensions are much more unequal than pre-retirement earnings and yearly pensions. Our findings also show that mortality explains more than 50 percent of the inequality of lifetime pensions within cohorts, and plays an important role in explaining changes in inequality across cohorts (192 percent among men and 44 percent among women). Pension policies can affect lifetime pension inequality, but such effects are limited in magnitude unless they directly affect the number of years of receiving pensions. 

The length of retirement life may be highly unequal due to persistent and significant discrepancies in old-age mortality. This study assesses gender and educational differences in the average retirement life span and the variation in retirement life span, taking into account individual labor force exit and reentry dynamics. We used longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study from 1996 to 2016, focusing on respondents aged 50 and older (N = 32,228). Multistate life tables were estimated using discrete-time event history models. The average retirement life span, as well as absolute and relative variation in retirement life span, were calculated analytically. Among women, we found a persistent educational gradient in average retirement life span over the whole period studied; among men, the relationship between education and retirement expectancy differed across periods. Women and the lower-educated had higher absolute variation in retirement life span than men and the higher-educated—yet these relationships were reversed when examined by relative variation. Our multistate approach provides an accurate and comprehensive picture of the retirement life span of older Americans over the past two decades. Such findings should be considered in high-level discussions on Social Security. Potential reforms such as raising the eligibility age or cutting benefits may have unexpected implications for different social groups due to their differential effects on retirement initiation and reentry dynamics.

The study of the mortality differences between groups has traditionally focused on metrics that describe average levels of mortality, for example life expectancy and standardized mortality rates. Additional insights can be gained by using statistical distance metrics to examine differences in lifespan distributions between groups. Here, we use a distance metric, the non-overlap index, to capture the sociological concept of stratification, which emphasizes the emergence of unique, hierarchically layered social strata. We show an application using Finnish registration data that cover the entire population over the period from 1996 to 2017. The results indicate that lifespan stratification and life-expectancy differences between income groups both increased substantially from 1996 to 2008; subsequently, life-expectancy differences declined, whereas stratification stagnated for men and increased for women. We conclude that the non-overlap index uncovers a unique domain of inequalities in mortality and helps to capture important between-group differences that conventional approaches miss.

• WIC Conference Poster Award Winner

As with many social transfer schemes, pension systems around the world are often progressive: individuals with lower incomes receive a higher percentage of their income as a subsequent pension. On the other hand, those with lower earnings have higher mortality and thus accumulate fewer years of pension income. Both of these opposing factors influence the progressiveness of pension systems. Empirical efforts to disentangle the effects of mortality inequality on lifetime pension inequality have been scarce. Using Swedish taxation data linked with death registers for 1970–2018, we study how education and preretirement earnings relate to lifetime pensions from age 60 onward and how mortality inequalities contribute to overall inequalities in lifetime pensions. The results show that a progressive replacement structure and mortality differences contribute to the overall distribution of pension payments over the life course. Up to one quarter of lifetime pension inequality is attributable to the greater longevity of socially advantaged groups—particularly among men. Hence, mortality inequalities are an important determinant of the overall degree of between-group income transfers in a pension system, but they are not as important as inequalities in prior earnings.

Previous studies have documented a historically strong and negative association between countries’ life expectancy (i.e., average longevity) and length-of-life inequality (i.e., variability in ages at death). The relationship between both variables might be partially explained by life expectancy increasing at a faster pace than maximal length of life, a phenomenon that mechanically compresses the age-at-death distribution and has not been taken into consideration in previous studies. In this paper, we propose a new approach to lifespan inequality measurement that accounts for the (uncertainly) bounded nature of length-of-life. Applying the new approach to the countries of the Human Mortality Database, we observe that the decline in overall lifespan variability typically associated with increases in longevity seems to stop and even reverse at higher levels of life expectancy. This suggests the emergence of worrying ethical dilemmas, whereby higher achievements in longevity would only be possible at the expense of higher lifespan variability.

Income is a strong predictor of adult mortality. Measuring income is not as simple as it may sound. It can be conceptualized at the individual or the household level, with the former better reflecting an individual's earning ability, and the latter better capturing living standards. Furthermore, respondents are often grouped into income categories based on their positions in the income distribution, and this operationalization can be done on the basis of age-specific or total population income distributions. In this study, we look at how four combinations of different conceptualizations (individual vs. household) and operationalizations (age-specific vs. total population) of income can affect mortality inequality estimates. Using Finnish registry data, we constructed period life tables for ages 25+ from 1996 to 2017 by gender and for four income definitions. The results indicated that the slope index of inequality for life expectancy varied by 1.1–5.7 years between income definitions, with larger differences observed for women than for men. The overall age patterns of relative index of inequality for mortality rates yielded by the four definitions were similar, but the levels differed. The period trends across income definitions were consistent for men, but not for women. We conclude that researchers should pay particular attention to the choice of the income definitions when analyzing the association between income and mortality, and when comparing the magnitude of inequality across studies and over time.