Investigating mortality uncertainty using the block bootstrap

Abstract

This paper proposes a block bootstrap method for measuring mortality risk under the Lee-Carter model framework. In order to take account of all sources of risk (the process risk, the parameter risk, and the model risk) properly, a block bootstrap is needed to cope with the spatial dependence found in the residuals. As a result, the prediction intervals we obtain for life expectancy are more accurate than the ones obtained from other similar methods. © 2010 Xiaoming Liu and W. John Braun.