Abstract
Individual life expectancies provide information for individuals making retirement decisions and for policy makers. For couples, analogous measures are the expected years both spouses will be alive (joint life expectancy) and the expected years the surviving spouse will be a widow or widower (survivor life expectancy). Using individual life expectancies to calculate summary measures for couples is intuitively appealing but yield misleading results, overstating joint life expectancy and dramatically understating survivor life expectancies. This implies that standard "individual life cycle models" are misleading for couples and that "couple life cycle models" must be substantially more complex. Using the CDC life tables for 2010, we construct joint and survivor life expectancy measures for randomly formed couples. The couples we form are defined by age, race and ethnicity, and education. Due to assortative marriage, inequalities in individual life expectancies are compounded into inequalities in joint and survivor life expectancies. We also calculate life expectancy measures for randomly formed couples for the 1930-2010 decennial years. Trends over time show how the relative rate of decrease in the mortality rates of men and women affect joint and survivor life expectancies. Because our couple life expectancy measures are based on randomly formed couples, they do not capture the effects of differences in spouses' premarital characteristics (apart from sex, age, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, education) or of correlations in spouses' experiences or behaviors during marriage. However, they provide benchmarks which have been sorely lacking in the public discourse.
Highlights
Measures of joint and survivor life expectancy are potentially useful to those designing or evaluating policies affecting older couples and to couples making retirement, savings, and long-term care decisions
We focus on 60-year-old wives and their husbands because these are ages at which many couples make crucial retirement-related decisions such as leaving career employment and claiming retirement and social security benefits
We present the individual life expectancy of women aged 60, the average life expectancy of spouses, and measures of joint and survivor life expectancy for the appropriately weighted average of couples in which the wife was aged 60
Summary
Measures of joint and survivor life expectancy are potentially useful to those designing or evaluating policies affecting older couples and to couples making retirement, savings, and long-term care decisions. Couple-based measure of life expectancies are virtually unknown in the social sciences. Mortality rates: CDC, National Center for Health Statistics. Mortality rates by education: Bound J, Geronimus AT, Rodriguez JM, Waidmann TA. Measuring recent apparent declines in longevity: the role of increasing educational attainment.
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