CBDX: A Workhorse Mortality Model from the Cairns-Blake-Dowd Family
Kevin Dowd, Andrew J.G. Cairns & David Blake
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to identify a workhorse mortality model for the adult age range (i.e., excluding the accident hump and younger ages). It applies the “general procedure” (GP) of Hunt and Blake (2014) to identify an age-period model that fits the data well before adding in a cohort effect that captures the residual year-of-birth effects arising in the original age-period model. The resulting model is intended to be suitable for a variety of populations, but economises on the number of period effects in comparison with a full implementation of the GP. We estimate the model using two different iterative Maximum Likelihood (ML) approaches – one Partial ML and the other Full ML – that avoid the need to specify identifiability constraints.
Key Words:
mortality rates, Cairns-Blake-Dowd mortality model, CBDX mortality model