Mortality, Health, and Marriage: A Study based on Taiwan’s Population Data

The life expectancies have been increasing significantly since the start of 20 century and the trends of mortality improvement are likely to continue in the 21 century. The stochastic mortality models are used frequently to predict the expansion in life expectancy. In addition to gender, age, period, and cohort are three main risk factors considered in constructing the mortality models. Other than these factors, it is believed that the marriage status is related to health and longevity and many studies found that the married have lower mortality rates than those of the unmarried. In this study, we use Taiwan’s marital data of the whole population (married, unmarried, divorced/widowed) to evaluate if the marriage status can be a preferred criteria. In addition to checking if the mortality rates are the same for different marital status, we want to know if this preferred criteria is valid in the future. We choose two popular mortality models, Lee-Carter and Age-period-cohort models, to model the mortality improvements of various marital statuses. Since the linear dependence in parameters of Age-period-cohort model, we use computer simulation to help us choose appropriate estimation method. Based on the Taiwan marital data, we found that the married have significantly lower mortality rates than the single and, if converting the difference into life insurance policy, the amount of discount is even larger than that of smokers/nonsmokers.