Ugofilippo Basellini

• PhD
• Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The Gaza War, triggered by the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, has resulted in significant loss of life and intensified an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Despite increasing demand for accurate measures of conflict severity, mortality estimates remain challenging due to the inherent `statistical fog of war' surrounding ongoing conflicts. In parti...

Commonly used measures of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, such as the slope and the relative index of inequality, are based on summary measures of the group-specific age-at-death distributions (e.g. standardized mortality rate or life expectancy). While this approach is informative, it ignores valuable information contained in the group-sp...

Excess mortality, i.e. the difference between expected and observed mortality, is used to quantify the death toll of mortality shocks, such as infectious disease-related epidemics and pandemics. However, predictions of expected mortality are sensitive to model assumptions. Among three specifications of a Serfling-Poisson regression for seasonal mor...

The Israel-Hamas war, triggered by the October 7th 2023 Hamas-led attack in Israel, has caused extensive mortality and sparked a major humanitarian crisis in the region. Direct conflict mortality has been mostly concentrated among non-combatants in the Gaza Strip. Here, most of the population has been internally displaced and faces limited access t...

Drawing cohort profiles and cohort forecasts from grids of age–period data is common practice in demography. In this research note, we (1) show how demographic measures artificially fluctuate when calculated from the diagonals of age–period rates because of timing and cohort-size bias, (2) estimate the magnitude of these biases, and (3) illustrate...

BACKGROUND In the light of recent concerns about the reliability of scientific research, the open science movement has attracted considerable attention and interest from a variety of sources, including researchers, research institutions, the business industry, intergovernmental organizations, the media and the public. However, the current extent of...

In recent years, lifespan inequality has become an important indicator of population health, alongside more established longevity measures. Uncovering the statistical properties of lifespan inequality measures can provide novel insights on the study of mortality developments.We revisit the "e-dagger" measure of lifespan inequality, introduced in Va...

In many low-mortality countries, life expectancy at birth increased steadily over the last century. In particular, both Italian females and males benefited from faster improvements in mortality compared to other high-income countries, especially from the 1960s, leading to an exceptional increase in life expectancy. However, Italy has not become the...

The introduction of the Lee–Carter (LC) method marked a breakthrough in mortality forecasting, providing a simple yet powerful data-driven stochastic approach. The method has the merit of capturing the dynamics of mortality change by a single time index that is almost invariably linear. This thirtieth anniversary review of its 1992 publication exam...

The Gini coefficient of the life table is a concentration index that provides information on lifespan variation. Originally proposed by economists to measure income and wealth inequalities, it has been widely used in population studies to investigate variation in ages at death. We focus on the complement of the Gini coefficient, Drewnowski’s index,...

The introduction of the Lee-Carter (LC) method marked a breakthrough in mortality forecasting, providing a simple yet powerful data-driven stochastic approach. The method has the merit of capturing the dynamics of mortality change by a single time index that is invariably linear. This 30th anniversary review of its 1992 publication examines the LC...

In many low-mortality countries, life expectancy at birth increased steadily over the last century. In particular, both Italianfemales and males benefited from faster improvements in mortality compared to other high-income countries, especially fromthe 1960s, leading to an exceptional increase in life expectancy. However, Italy has not become the l...

In many low-mortality countries, life expectancy at birth increased steadily over the last century. In particular, both Italianfemales and males benefited from faster improvements in mortality compared to other high-income countries, especially fromthe 1960s, leading to an exceptional increase in life expectancy. However, Italy has not become the l...

Drawing cohort profiles and cohort forecasts from grids of age-period data is common practice in demography. In this research note, we: (1) estimate the bias in the cohort TFR and life expectancies calculated from such data, and (2) demonstrate that cohort Lee-Carter forecasts drawn from an age-period grid have implausible prediction intervals, esp...

The COVID-19 outbreak has called for renewed attention to the need for sound statistical analyses to monitor mortality patterns and trends over time. Excess mortality has been suggested as the most appropriate indicator to measure the overall burden of the pandemic in terms of mortality. As such, excess mortality has received considerable interest...

The Gini coefficient of the life table is a concentration index that provides information on lifespan variation. Originally proposed by economists to measure income and wealth inequalities, it has been widely used in population studies to investigate variation in ages at death. We focus on a complementary indicator, Drewnowski's index, which is as...

Italy was hit harshly by the Covid-19 pandemic, registering more than 35,000 Covid-19 deaths between February and July 2020. During this first wave of the epidemic, the virus spread unequally across the country, with northern regions witnessing more cases and deaths. We investigate demographic and socio-economic factors contributing to the diverse...

Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented worldwide to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, the effectiveness of such governmental measures in reducing the mortality burden remains a key question of scientific interest and public debate. In this study, we leverage digital mobility data to assess the effects of reduced human mobility o...

The Lee–Carter (LC) model represents a landmark paper in mortality forecasting. While having been widely accepted and adopted, the model has some limitations that hinder its performance. Some variants of the model have been proposed to deal with these drawbacks individually, none coped with them all at the same time. In this paper, we propose a Thr...

BACKGROUND The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged as a global threat at the beginning of 2020, spreading around the globe at different times and rates. Within a country, such differences provide the opportunity for strategic allocations of health care resources.OBJECTIVE We aim to provide a tool to estimate and visualize differences in the spre...

The prediction of human longevity levels in the future by direct forecasting of life expectancy offers numerous advantages, compared to methods based on extrapolation of age-specific death rates. However, the reconstruction of accurate life tables starting from a given level of life expectancy at birth, or any other age, is not straightforward. Mod...

The current outbreak of COVID-19 has called renewed attention to the need for sound statistical analysis for monitoring mortality patterns and trends over time. Excess mortality has been suggested as the most appropriate indicator to measure the overall burden of the pandemic on mortality. As such, excess mortality has received considerable interes...

Mortality forecasting has recently received growing interest, as accurate projections of future lifespans are needed to ensure the solvency of insurance and pension providers. Several innovative stochastic methodologies have been proposed in most recent decades, the majority of them being based on age-specific mortality rates or on summary measures...

In the last three decades, considerable progress in mortality forecasting has been achieved, with new and more sophisticated models being introduced. Most of these forecasting models are based on the extrapolation of past trends, often assuming linear (or log-linear) development of mortality indicators, such as death rates or life expectancy. Howev...

COVerAGE-DB is an open-access database including cumulative counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and tests by age and sex. Original data and sources are provided alongside data and measures in age-harmonized formats. The database is still in development, and at this writing, it includes 87 countries, and 195 subnational areas. Cumulative cou...

Italy was harshly hit by COVID-19, registering more than 35,000 deaths between February and July, 2020. The virus spread unequally across the country, with northern regions witnessing more cases and deaths than those in the centre and south. We investigate demographic and socio-economic factors that contributed to the diverse regional impact of the...

Mortality models approximate mortality patterns or dynamics over age and time. An age pattern of mortality can be any mathematical function of mortality, such as rates, probabilities, survivorship, or death distributions. Such functions may be modeled in the form of a life table or a simplified function with some parameters. Mortality models in gen...

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, a number of non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented to contain the spread of the pandemic. Despite the recent reduction in the number of infections and deaths in Europe, it is still unclear to which extent these governmental actions have contained the spread of the disease and reduced mortality. In...

Mortality forecasting has received increasing interest during recent decades due to the negative financial effects of continuous longevity improvements on public and private institutions’ liabilities. However, little attention has been paid to forecasting mortality from a cohort perspective. In this article, we introduce a novel methodology to fore...

Significance Why life expectancy and life span equality have increased together is a question of scientific interest. Both measures are calculated for a calendar year and might not describe a cohort’s actual life course. Nonetheless, life expectancy provides a useful measure of average life spans, and life span equality gives insights into uncertai...

Several parametric mortality models have been proposed to describe the age pattern of mortality since Gompertz introduced his “law of mortality” almost two centuries ago. However, very few attempts have been made to reconcile most of these models within a single framework. In this article, we show that many mortality models used in the demographic...

Age-at-death distributions provide an informative description of the mortality pattern of a population but have generally been neglected for modelling and forecasting mortality. In this paper, we use the distribution of deaths to model and forecast adult mortality. Specifically, we introduce a relational model that relates a fixed ‘standard’ to a s...

Aging is characterized by rising mortality, declining fertility and declines in physiological function with age (functional senescence). Sex differences in the tempo and severity of survival and fertility declines are widespread, but it is less clear how often and how much trajectories of functional senescence diverge between the sexes. We tested h...

Studies examining how diet affects mortality risk over age typically characterise mortality using parameters such as aging rates, which condense how much and how quickly the risk of dying changes over time into a single measure. Demographers have suggested that decoupling the tempo and the magnitude of changing mortality risk may facilitate compara...

Evidence suggests that the increasing life expectancy levels at birth witnessed over the past centuries are associated with a decreasing concentration of the survival times. The purpose of this work is to study the relationships that exist between longevity and concentration measures for some regression models for the evolution of survival. In part...