Mortality is different across countries, states and regions. Several empirical research works however reveal that mortality trends exhibit a common pattern and show similar structures across populations. The key element in analyzing mortality rate is a time-varying indicator curve. Our main...

Multi-population mortality forecasting has become an increasingly important area in actuarial science and demography, as a means to avoid long-run divergence in mortality projection. This paper aims to establish a unified state-space Bayesian framework to model, estimate and forecast mortality...

Since the influential paper of Stock and Watson (2002), the dynamic factor model (DFM) has been widely used for forecasting macroeconomic key variables such as GDP. However, the DFM has some weaknesses. For nowcasting, the dynamic factor model is modified by using the mixed data sampling...

Assessing the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 is one of the most controversial issues during the pandemic. Due to asymptomatic or mild courses of COVID-19, many infections remain undetected. Reported case fatality rates - COVID-19-associated deaths divided by number of detected...

Accurate counts of cases and deaths are critical for devising an optimal pandemic response. Yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, so too has the recognition that cases and deaths have been underreported, perhaps vastly so. Here, we present an econometric strategy to estimate the true...

Contrary to previous findings, we find a systematic and economically sizeable relationship between income levels and life expectancy in a panel dataset of 197 countries over 213 years. By itself, GDP/capita explains more than 64 percent of the variation in life expectancy. The Preston curve...

We analyze the effect of economic conditions early in life on individual mortality rate later in life, using business cycle conditions early in life as an exogenous indicator. Individual records from Dutch registers of birth, marriage, and death, covering a window of unprecedented size...

Due to ageing population and low birth rates, the European Union (EU) will need to import foreign labour in the next decades. In this context, the EU neighbouring countries (ENC) are the main countries of origin and transit of legal and illegal migration towards Europe. Their economic, cultural...

Crises in financial markets affect humans worldwide. Detailed market data on trading decisions reflect some of the complex human behavior that has led to these crises. We suggest that massive new data sources resulting from human interaction with the Internet may offer a new perspective on the...

Due to ageing population and low birth rates, the European Union (EU) will need to import foreign labour in the next decades. In this context, the EU neighbouring countries (ENC) are the main countries of origin and transit of legal and illegal migration towards Europe. Their economic, cultural...