The case for the importance of mortality crises may need to rest on more than their magnitude
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24 Nov 2026
14:30-15:30, Butler Room, Nuffield College
- Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science Seminar Add to Calendar
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas is an assistant professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and European Studies at UW–Madison. His research lies at the intersection of demography and population economics. He studies the determinants and measurement of fertility and mortality. A central theme of his recent work is the distinction between period and cohort perspectives. Demographic trends are often summarized with period measures such as life expectancy, which can mask important differences across birth cohorts. Much of his current work explores how cohort perspectives change our understanding of mortality trends, the determinants of fertility, and demographic forecasting. His work has appeared in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Population Economics, and Demography. He edits NEP-DEM, a weekly newsletter of new working papers in demographic economics featured in IDEAS.
Period-based life table methods remain the main approach to assessing loss of life from mortality crises, despite their known limitations. We reassess 367 crises drawn from 236 countries and territories over the last 270 years from a cohort perspective, using recently developed approaches that apply crisis mortality only at the ages actually exposed. Our findings suggest that period measures can overstate losses by one to nearly two orders of magnitude. What is more, we also find substantial disagreements in how crises are ranked, in some cases enough to move crises between the deadliest and the middle of the distribution. We do not interpret these findings as necessarily indicating that crises matter less than we thought. We believe they point to the potential of agendas that look beyond magnitude and focus on how deaths from mortality crises are particularly disruptive because they are concentrated in time, age, and place.