Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage upon highly granular death registry data for over 4,000 Italian municipalities in a...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused generous and well-developed healthcare systems to collapse. This paper quantifies how much system congestion may have increased mortality rates, using distance to the ICU as a proxy for access to emergency care.Methods: We match daily death registry...

Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and...

The Matthew effect refers to the adage written some two-thousand years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “For to all those who have, more will be given.” Even two millennia later, this idiom is used by sociologists to qualitatively describe the dynamics of individual progress and the...

Continuous longevity improvements and population ageing have led countries to modify national public pension schemes by increasing the standard and early retirement ages in a discretionary, scheduled, or automatic way, and by making it harder for people to retire prematurely. To this end,...

In recent years the issue of life expectancy has become of upmost importance to pension providers, insurance companies and the government bodies in the developed world. Significant and consistent improvements in mortality rates and hence life expectancy have led to unprecedented increases in the...

How should we compare welfare across pension systems in presence of differential mortality? A commonly used standard utilitarian criterion implicitly favors the long-lived over the short-lived. We investigate under what conditions this ranking is reversed. We clearly distinguish between the...

In this project, we study the issue of gender disparity in mortality improvement trends. We first develop a statistical test to examine the extent of such disparity for different age groups, and then apply the proposed test to mortality data from various Asia-Pacific countries. Our preliminary...

The cost of longevity guarantees of traditional annuity products has increased in the recent scenario, characterized by declining mortality rates, in particular at unanticipated levels. Increasing the annuity loading rewarding the accepted longevity risk is not an option for annuity providers,...

Many empirical studies confirm that policyholder's subjective mortality beliefs deviate from the information given by publicly available mortality tables. In this study, we look at the effect of subjective mortality beliefs on the perceived attractiveness of retirement products, focusing on two...