View article

This paper investigates mortality inequality across U.S. states by modeling and forecasting mortality rates via a forecast reconciliation approach. Understanding the heterogeneity in state-level mortality experience is of fundamental importance, as it can assist decision making for policymakers, health authorities, as well as local communities who are seeking to reduce inequalities and disparities in life expectancy. A key challenge of multi-population mortality modeling is high dimensionality, and the resulting complex dependence structures across sub-populations. Moreover, when projecting future mortality rates, it is important to ensure that the state-level forecasts are coherent with the national-level forecasts. We address these issues by first obtaining independent state-level forecasts based on classical stochastic mortality models, and then incorporating the dependence structure in the forecast reconciliation …