Overview
Roland Rau is a demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany. His research focuses on old-age and advanced-age mortality, mortality forecasting, and demographic analysis of populations at extreme ages. He is a principal investigator associated with the Kannisto-Thatcher Database (KTDB), which collects population and death count data for individuals aged 80 and above across 30+ developed countries.
Key Contributions
- Rau et al. (2006) — 10 Years After Kannisto: Updated Kannisto et al.'s (1994) landmark findings on advanced-age mortality using KTDB data through 2000. Key findings: (1) 80+ and 100+ populations grew in every country studied, directly refuting Fries's (1980) population-count prediction; (2) annual improvement rates were monotonically accelerating across four successive decade pairs in both sexes for all 19 countries with sufficient data (males 80–89: 0.81% → 1.88%/yr; females 80–89: 0.91% → 2.45%/yr); (3) no biological minimum detected — Japan, with the lowest current death rates, showed among the fastest improvement rates; (4) the US was a prominent outlier whose stagnation since the mid-1980s was "not yet understood." See Period Mortality and SSA Mortality Forecasting.
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