Overview
Carl Boe is a Research Demographer at Mountain View Research (Los Altos, California), where his work spans statistical analysis, the demography and biology of fertility and mortality, and the development of quantitative models of social systems. In the context of this wiki he is relevant for two foundational papers co-authored with Shripad Tuljapurkar: a 1999 study of stochastic fertility forecasting validation and Bayesian priors for the long-run TFR assumption (see Tuljapurkar and Boe 1999 — Validation, Probability-Weighted Priors, and Information in Stochastic Forecasts), and the G7 universality paper establishing that the LC single-factor structure holds in all G7 countries (see Tuljapurkar, Li and Boe 2000 — A Universal Pattern of Mortality Decline in the G7 Countries).
Key Contributions / Features
- Tuljapurkar and Boe (1999) — "Validation, Probability-Weighted Priors, and Information in Stochastic Forecasts." International Journal of Forecasting 15: 259–271. Validated Lee's constrained ARMA fertility model against US TFR data via historical launch experiments (1945, 1955, 1965, 1975); demonstrated that the long-run average fertility (F*) operates on 30–50 year timescales not probed by time-series estimation, creating irreducible structural uncertainty; showed that Bayesian empirical priors over F* widen intervals ~15% relative to the F* = 2.1 benchmark. See Long-Term Actuarial Balance for why this structural uncertainty makes fertility the dominant source of 75-year OASDI solvency uncertainty.
- Tuljapurkar, Li, and Boe (2000) — "A Universal Pattern of Mortality Decline in the G7 Countries." Nature 405: 789–792. Established that the LC single-factor structure holds in all G7 countries (>94% of temporal variance in log death rates explained by one factor), with stochastic median e0 forecasts exceeding official central projections by 1.3–8.0 years by 2050. See Lee-Carter Model.
- Gómez-Redondo and Boe (2005) — "Decomposition Analysis of Spanish Life Expectancy at Birth: Evolution and Changes in the Components by Sex and Age." Demographic Research 13(20): 521–546. Applies the Pollard (1988) continuous decomposition to Spain's e₀ gains (1971–2001) using HMD data; elderly mortality dominates gains; identifies a retrogression at young male ages (15–29) in the 1980s from simultaneous traffic accident and HIV/AIDS epidemics; sex-gap narrowing since 1990 is a transient recovery. See Life Expectancy Decomposition.
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