Individual life expectancies are easy to calculate from individual
mortality rates and provide useful summary measures 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
spend as a widow or widower (survivor life expectancy). Using
individual life expectancies to calculate summary measures for couples
yields substantially misleading results because the mortality
distribution of husbands and wives overlap substantially.
To illustrate,
consider a wife aged 60 whose husband is 62. In 2010, the wife's life
expectancy was 24.5 years and her husband's 20.2 years. The couple's
joint life expectancy, however, is only 17.7 years. Although her life
expectancy is four years longer than his, if she is widowed
(probability: .62), her survivor life expectancy is 12.5 years; if the
husband is a widower (probability: .38), his survivor life expectancy is
9.5 years.
Using 2010 data, this study
also investigates differences in joint and survivor life expectancy by
race and ethnicity and by education.
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