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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of flood occurrence on mortality rate and life expectancy amongst 53 African countries.

The study utilizes panel data from the period 2000–2018 on 53 African countries and system generalized method of moments (system GMM) for the analysis.

The result indicates that flood occurrence causes the destruction of health facilities and the spread of diseases which reduces life expectancy. In addition, flood occurrence increases mortality rate amongst 53 African countries.

The study recommends that governments amongst African countries should implement strategies being enshrined in Conference of Parties (COP, 2021) on climate change. This will help to reduce the level of climate change and flood occurrence.

Previous studies focussed on the adverse effect of flood occurrence without considering the issue of life expectancy amongst African countries. This study contributes to existing empirical studies by examining the effect of flood occurrence on mortality rate and life expectancy amongst African countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-07-2022-0508.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of national unemployment rates on overall age and cause‐specific mortality rates in a panel sample of 13 European Union countries.

A fixed‐effects model is used to control for unobserved time‐invariant characteristics within countries. In addition, controls such as lifestyle risk factors, urbanisation and medical intervention indicators, for potential confounders are used.

Contrary to some recent evidence this study shows that there is a strong, positive relationship between adverse economic conditions and mortality. This is in contrast to findings about the US case.

This paper revisits the issue of the unemployment‐mortality relationship by utilising fixed effect models with controls for various indicators that are expected to affect mortality, in contrast to previous studies.

Systematic mortality risk, i.e. the risk of unexpected changes in mortality and survival rates, can substantially impact a life insurers' risk and solvency situation. By using the “natural hedge” between life insurance and annuities, insurance companies have an effective tool for reducing their net‐exposure. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this risk management tool and to quantify its effectiveness in hedging against changes in mortality with respect to default risk measures.

To achieve this goal, the paper models the insurance company as a whole and takes into account the interaction between assets and liabilities. Systematic mortality risk is considered in two ways. First, systematic mortality risk is modeled using scenario analyses and, second, empirically observed changes in mortality rates for the last 10‐15 years are used.

The paper demonstrates that the consideration of both the asset and liability side is vital to obtain deeper insight into the impact of natural hedging on an insurer's risk situation and shows how to reach a desired safety level while simultaneously immunizing the portfolio against changes in mortality rates.

The paper contributes to the literature by considering the insurance company as a whole in a multi‐period setting and taking into account both, assets and liabilities, as well as their interaction. Furthermore, the paper shows how to obtain a desired safety level while simultaneously immunizing a portfolio against changes in default risk.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of critical macroeconomic drivers like economic growth (gross domestic product (GDP)/capita), inflation and population size on the mortality rate of Nigeria. The general lockdown imposed by the government to curb the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had so many effects like loss of jobs, insecurity, businesses collapsing, salary cuts, unemployment and increased prices of commodities in the market.

The paper focused on secondary data for the period 1991–2019 for GDP/capita, inflation, population size and mortality rate which were obtained from World Development Indicators (WDI). Time series analysis tests like augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF), Bounds co-integration and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) were used to determine the stationarity conditions of the variables, co-integration presence among the variables and to determine the short-run and long-run relationships between the endogenous and exogenous variables.

The study shows that the variables are stationary at different orders i.e. I (0) and I (1) and the presence of co-integration among the variables. There exists a positive relationship between GDP/capita and mortality rate on the short-run which means increase in GDP/capita does not reduce the mortality rate in the country, there is also a positive short-run relationship between inflation and mortality rate but there are no long-run relationships among the variables.

The paper clearly examines the impact of GDP/capita, inflation and population growth on mortality rate in Nigeria.

In the UK, there is a strong government commitment to the compulsory use of annuities to manage the “decumulation” of assets in defined contribution pension schemes. Almost all annuity rates are determined by reference to the gender of the individual involved. This has the implication that females receive a lower pension for a given size of pension fund. It is arguable that this situation represents a clear case of sex discrimination and moral, legal‐ and policy‐based arguments can be made for and against this view. The purpose of this paper is to review these arguments in the light of emerging evidence about longevity.

The paper outlines the nature of the UK annuity market and the associated methods of annuity pricing, details the difficulties of predicting longevity and discusses the economic implications of a move to unisex annuity rates.

A number of recent trends are weakening the financial and statistical arguments against introducing unisex annuity rates. The life expectancy of males and females is converging, the use of annuity pricing factors other than gender is increasingly common and it has become clear that there is great uncertainty in mortality projections.

Statistical and financial arguments that gender should be a primary factor for costing annuities should be accorded less weight than in the past.

The paper offers an evaluation of the merits of unisex annuity rates in the light of recent evidence about longevity.

We study changes in age-specific diabetes-related mortality and annual health care utilization. We find that half of the estimated 16% increase of diabetic mortality falls within employable age groups. We estimate that disease combination-specific increase in case fatality has resulted in premature diabetic mortality costing $3.2 billion annually. The estimated annual direct cost of treating high-risk diabetics reaches $36 billion, of which Medicare and Other Federal Programs compensate 54%. Respiratory conditions among diabetics comprise the same proportion of high-risk diabetics as do the disease combinations including coronary heart diseases. Treating of general diabetic conditions has become more efficient as indicated by the estimated declines in per unit health care costs.

In recent years, a number of historians have examined the reasons for differences in the height and health of men and women in nineteenth-century Britain, often drawing on economic studies which link excess female mortality in the developing world to restrictions in women's employment opportunities. This paper re-examines this literature and summarises the existing literature on sex-specific differences in height, weight and mortality in England and Wales before 1850. It then uses two electronic datasets to examine changes in cause-specific mortality rates between 1851 and 1995. Although there is little evidence to support the view that the systematic neglect of female children was responsible for high rates of female mortality in childhood, there is rather more evidence to show that gender inequalities contributed to excess female mortality in adulthood.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate socioeconomic factors related to COVID-19 mortality rates in New York City (NYC) to understand the connections between socioeconomic variables, including race and income and the disease.

Using multivariable negative binomial regression, the association between health and mortality disparities related to COVID-19 and socioeconomic conditions is evaluated. The authors obtained ZIP code-level data from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the US Census Bureau.

This study concludes that the mortality rate rises in areas with a higher proportion of Hispanic and Black residents, whereas areas with higher income rates had lower mortality associated with COVID-19, among over 18,000 confirmed deaths in NYC.

The paper highlights the impacts of social, racial and wealth disparities in mortality rates. It brings to focus the importance of targeted policies regarding these disparities to alleviate health inequality among marginalized communities and to reduce disease mortality.

This study aims to explore the link between mortality and climate change. The focus is in particular on individuals’ adaptation to temperature changes. The authors analyze the relationship between climatic change (measured by temperature rate) and mortality in 23 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries during 1970-2010.

This study performs the adaptation regression model in the level form as a dynamic panel fixed effects model. The authors use a non-linear threshold estimation approach to examine the extreme temperature changes effect on the temperature–mortality relation. More specifically, the study explores whether the large increases/decreases in temperature rates affect mortality rates more than the modest changes.

This study indicates that the temperature–mortality relation is significant in early part of the sample period (before 1990) but insignificant during the second part (after 1990). After including controlling factors, as well as nation and year fixed effects, the authors provide evidence that people do adapt to the most of the temperature-related mortalities. Also, this study provides evidence of the non-linear relationship between national temperatures and mortality rates. It is observed that only after 5 per cent increase in the annual temperature, the relation between temperature and overall mortality is significant.

Most studies cover only one specific country, hence making it difficult to generalize across countries. Therefore, the authors argue that the best estimation of the health effects of temperature change can be found by modeling the past relationships between temperature and mortality across countries for a relatively long period. To the authors’ knowledge, previous studies have not systemically tested the adaptation effect across countries.

The study of war has generally been neglected in sociology, with much of the discussion focusing around military spending or the organization of the military rather than war per se. Sociologists have critiqued and investigated the military-industrial complex (Mills, 1959), investigated morale in military units (Durkheim, 1951; Stouffer & DeVinney, 1955), and studied the socialization of soldiers (Cockerham & Cohen, 1980). However, the direct examination of war has been relatively rare. When war has been examined, sociological research has focused on the causes of war, often discussing the preconditions of revolutions (Goldstone, Gurr & Moshiri, 1991; Skopol, 1979), or the reasons for military interventions by core countries in the peripheral countries of the world system (Kowalewski, 1991). Examinations of the sociological impact of war on civilian populations have been even rarer.