Assessing implicit hypotheses in life table construction

Mortality figures are of capital importance for policy-making and public planning, as in forecasting financial provisions in public pension systems. General population life tables are constructed from aggregated statistics, an issue that usually entails adopting some (implicit) assumptions in their construction, such as the hypothesis of closed demographic system or the hypotheses of uniform distributions of death counts (and migration events) by age and calendar year. As microdata have become more abundant and reliable, these hypotheses could be assessed and more assumption-free estimators employed. Using a real database from Spain, we show that the above hypotheses are not appropriate in general and that the more efficient estimators proposed in this paper should be promoted, as differences persist depending on the estimator computed.