Extremes are not normal: a reminder to demographers

Anthony Medford () and James W. Vaupel
Additional contact information
Anthony Medford: University of Southern Denmark
James W. Vaupel: University of Southern Denmark

Journal of Population Research, 2020, vol. 37, issue 1, No 5, 106 pages

Abstract: Abstract Demographers have always held great interest in extremal phenomena. Extreme value distributions are tailor made to model extremes but demographers do not often take advantage of them. We argue that demographers would benefit by using these models more often and present one potential usage: the Extreme Value Distribution as a candidate for modelling the error distribution in time series models. As an example, we use the so called best practice life expectancy. The residuals from the fitted models are tested for Normality. They are also fitted with Gaussian and Generalized Extreme Value distributions and the fit of these two distributions is compared. The results suggest that demographers ought to further explore and take greater advantage of extreme value models.

Keywords: Extremes; Extreme value distributions; Model residuals; Maximum life expectancy; Residual tests; Demographic extremes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12546-019-09231-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joprea:v:37:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s12546-019-09231-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... tudies/journal/12546

DOI: 10.1007/s12546-019-09231-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Research is currently edited by Santosh Jatrana, Dharmalingam Arunachalam, Aude Bernard, Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Ann Evans, Michael Haan, Brian Houle, Trude Lappegård and Gordon Carmichael

More articles in Journal of Population Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().