This special issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics contains 10 contributions to the academic literature all dealing with longevity risk and capital markets. Draft versions of the papers were presented at Longevity 16: The Sixteenth International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conference that was held in Helsingør near Copenhagen on 13–14 August 2021. It was hosted by PerCent at Copenhagen Business School and the Pensions Institute at City, University of London.

In response to Steve L. Martin's critique of our recent paper we provide further evidence in support of our central contention: that geophytes were a nutritionally important part of the precontact diet, and that they functioned as dietary, cultural, and economic staple foods for many peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

Were the ancient Coast Salish farmers? Conventional anthropological wisdom asserts that the ethnographically known communities of the Northwest Coast of North America were “complex hunter-fisher-gatherers” who lacked any form of concerted plant food cultivation and production. Despite decades of extensive ethnobotanical and paleoethnobotanical study throughout the Pacific Northwest demonstrating the contrary, this “classic anomaly” is still a cornerstone of anthropological and archaeological canons. The recent discovery of a spectacularly preserved wetland wapato (Indian potato, Sagittaria latifolia) garden, built 3,800 years ago in Katzie traditional territory near Vancouver, British Columbia, has helped recast this picture, alongside evidence for other forms of resource management practiced by Northwest Coast peoples. This article examines “origins of agriculture” stories from three distinctive perspectives: Coast Salish Katzie people who cultivated wapato for millennia; settlers who colonized the Fraser River Delta historically, bringing with them their own ideas about what constitutes farming; and archaeologists, who are challenged by these data to reevaluate their own understandings of these cultural constructs. These perspectives have critical bearing on the historical appropriation of lands and waterways by settler communities in British Columbia as well as contemporary questions of sovereignty and stewardship in this region and well beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to identify a workhorse mortality model for the adult age range (i.e., excluding the accident hump and younger ages). It applies the “general procedure” (GP) of Hunt & Blake [(2014), North American Actuarial Journal, 18, 116–138] to identify an age-period model that fits the data well before adding in a cohort effect that captures the residual year-of-birth effects arising in the original age-period model. The resulting model is intended to be suitable for a variety of populations, but economises on the number of period effects in comparison with a full implementation of the GP. We estimate the model using two different iterative maximum likelihood (ML) approaches – one Partial ML and the other Full ML – that avoid the need to specify identifiability constraints.

The addition of a set of cohort parameters to a mortality model can generate complex identifiability issues due to the collinearity between the dimensions of age, period and cohort. These issues can lead to robustness problems and difficulties making projections of future mortality rates. Since many modern mortality models incorporate cohort parameters, we believe that a comprehensive analysis of the identifiability issues in age/period/cohort mortality models is needed. In this paper, we discuss the origin of identifiability issues in general models before applying these insights to simple but commonly used mortality models. We then discuss how to project mortality models so that our forecasts of the future are independent of any arbitrary choices we make when fitting a model to data in order to identify the historical parameters.

As the field of modelling mortality has grown in recent years, the number and importance of identifiability issues within mortality models has grown in parallel. This has led both to robustness problems and to difficulties in making projections of future mortality rates. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the identifiability issues in age/period mortality models in order to first understand them better and then to resolve them. To achieve this, we discuss how these identification issues arise, how to choose identification schemes which aid our demographic interpretation of the models and how to project the models so that our forecasts of the future do not depend upon the arbitrary choices used to identify the historical parameters estimated from historical data.

As more debates in American politics become constitutional questions, effective citizens must engage in constitutional interpretation. While most Americans venerate the Constitution as a part of a national, civil religion, levels of constitutional knowledge are also very low. In this paper, we analyze how ordinary Americans approach the task of constitutional interpretation. An analysis of two cross-sectional surveys indicates constitutional hermeneutics are a product of political factors, religious affiliation, and biblical interpretive preferences. We also present the results of a survey experiment where the manipulation of a clergy's interpretation of a biblical passage affects how respondents interpret both scripture and the Constitution, providing a potential causal mechanism for learning how to engage in hermeneutics.

The adoption of chemical fallow rotations in Pacific Northwest dryland winter wheat production has caused a weed species composition shift in which scouringrush has established in production fields. Thus, there has been interest in identifying herbicides that effectively control scouringrush in winter wheat–chemical fallow cropping systems. Field experiments were established in growers’ fields near Reardan, WA, in 2014, and The Dalles, OR, in 2015. Ten herbicide treatments were applied to mowed and nonmowed plots during chemical fallow rotations. Scouringrush stem densities were quantified the following spring and after wheat harvest at both locations. Chlorsulfuron plus MCPA-ester resulted in nearly 100% control of scouringrush through wheat harvest. Before herbicide application, mowing had no effect on herbicide efficacy. We conclude chlorsulfuron plus MCPA-ester is a commercially acceptable treatment for smooth and intermediate scouringrush control in winter wheat–chemical fallow cropping systems; however, the lack of a positive yield response when scouringrushes were controlled should factor into management decisions.

We introduce a new modelling framework to explain socio-economic differences in mortality in terms of an affluence index that combines information on individual wealth and income. The model is illustrated using data on older Danish males over the period 1985–2012 reported in the Statistics Denmark national register database. The model fits the historical mortality data well, captures their key features, generates smoothed death rates that allow us to work with a larger number of sub-groups than has previously been considered feasible, and has plausible projection properties.