The Population Life Table

James R. Carey, University of California, Davis
Hans Muller, University of California, Davis
Jane-Ling Wang, University of California, Davis

The population life table (PLT) is a stationary population conceived as a cohort that is initialized, normalized and indexed at population age zero (0). The PLT can be viewed from the perspective of: i) a population extinction model in which all cohorts are survived forward without replacement until the youngest cohort becomes the oldest and dies out after ω-years; or ii) a heterogeneity model where each age class constitutes a subcohort with frailty schedules corresponding to the age- and cohort-specific mortality schedules but re-indexed to population age. We will present the formal analytical framework (including the new life table identity) as an extension of an earlier paper by Müller et al (2004) and example applications in demography (new perspectives on comparative life tables) and ecology (estimating age structure).