On the Structural Change of the Lee-Carter Model and Its Actuarial Application

초록

Over the past decades, the Lee-Carter model [1] has attracted much attention from various demography-related fields in order to project the future mortality rates. In the Lee-Carter model, the speed of mortality improvement is stochastically modeled by the so-called mortality index and is used to forecast the future mortality rates based on the time series analysis. However, the modeling is applied to long time series and thus an important structural change might exist, leading to potentially large long-term forecasting errors. Therefore, in this paper, we are interested in detecting the structural change of the Lee-Carter model and investigating the actuarial implications. For the purpose, we employ the tests proposed by Coelho and Nunes [2] and analyze the mortality data for six countries including Korea since 1970. Also, we calculate life expectancies and whole life insurance premiums by taking into account the structural change found in the Korean male mortality rates. Our empirical result shows that more caution needs to be paid to the Lee-Carter modeling and its actuarial applications.