Publications

This paper investigates alternative measures of life expectancy that take into account distributional considerations in the length of life of the generation in a period life table. Virtually all the literature studying inequality in the length of life distribution has used inequality tools from the income distribution analysis, focusing on life expectancy and inequality as separate, albeit related, issues. We propose an alternative, integrated framework that allows us to combine both dimensions in a single index, and provide an axiomatic derivation that delivers the particular indexes to be used given a set of axioms. We illustrate the proposed index using data from the Human Mortality Database.