Beyond "Best Practices": Waiting Times to Life Expectancy Improvements

Sheila Xiao, University of California, Irvine
Andrew Noymer, University of California, Irvine

We propose a novel country-level life expectancy analysis. Sojourn time, a framework borrowed from stochastic processes, is the amount of time a country spends in a given life expectancy interval. We analyze all available data from the Human Mortality Database, calculating sojourn times for one-year increments in life expectancy. The preponderance of the evidence points to no increase in sojourn time as life expectancy increases. This supports the notion that life expectancy will continue to expand worldwide. Unlike the so-called "best practices" analysis, the present work considers more than one country at a time, so this is a useful corroboration of existing findings. We also explore one aspect of this analysis that is a useful reminder of the potential pitfalls of sample selection in the analysis of aggregate mortality data.