Individual Survival Expectations and Actual Mortality: Evidence from Dutch Survey and Administrative Data

Abstract

Because of the important role that survival expectations play in individual decision making, we investigate the extent to which individual responses to survival probability questions are informative about actual mortality. In contrast to earlier studies, which relied on the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) of US individuals aged 50 and over, we combine household survey data on subjective survival probabilities with administrative data on actual mortality for Dutch respondents aged 25 and over. Our main finding is that in our sample, individual life expectancies (measured as subjective survival probabilities) do predict actual mortality even when we control for a large set of health indicators. Our results further suggest that, on average, women underestimate their remaining life duration, whereas men tend to predict their survival chances more realistically. Both sexes, however, tend to overestimate the age gradient in mortality risk and underestimate the health risks of smoking.

Factors incorporated into future survival estimation among Europeans

“…Respondents who live with young or adult children report higher survival expectations (Liu, Tsou, and Hammitt 2007;Mirowsky 1999;Ross and Mirowsky 2002) and the lifespan of parents increases in line with the number of children (McArdle et al 2006). Higher SES is associated with higher subjective life expectancy (Rappange, Brouwer, and Exel 2016;Liu, Tsou, and Hammitt 2007;Hurd and McGarry 1995;Kutlu-Koc and Kalwij 2017) as well as lower mortality (Nandi, Glymour, and Subramanian 2014). These findings support our second hypothesis.…”

“…They conclude that both socioeconomic status (SES) and health matter in the assessment of own survival. Kutlu-Koc and Kalwij (2017) and Van Solinge and Henkens (2018) conclude that the subjective survival probabilities of Dutch respondents predict actual mortality.…”

Cognition, Optimism and the Formation of Age-Dependent Survival Beliefs

“…The signs of the coefficient estimates on the control variables reported in Table 6 of Appendix A.1 are broadly in line with prior expectations and what has been found in the literature, cf. Khwaja et al (2007), Khwaja et al (2009), Kutlu-Koc andKalwij (2017). E.g., most measures of health limitations are positively associated with the hazard of dying.…”

Cognition, Optimism, and the Formation of Age‐dependent Survival Beliefs

“…Comparing individual-level SSBs to survival probabilities extracted from aggregate cohort life tables as, for example, in Perozek (2008), Ludwig and Zimper (2013), Peracchi and Perotti (2014), and Groneck et al (2016), is ill-suited because individuallevel OSPs generally deviate from sample averages. In order to estimate individual-level OSPs, we instead follow Khwaja et al (2007), Khwaja et al (2009), Winter and Wuppermann (2014), Kutlu-Koc and Kalwij (2017), Perozek (2008), Bissonnette et al (2017), and Siegel et al (2003) by adapting a mixed-proportional hazard (MPH) model, see van den Berg (2001). This allows us to estimate hazard rates conditional on a broad set of individual-level characteristics and to simulate survival probabilities for the full sample by making out-ofsample predictions.…”