Coupling between death spikes and birth troughs. Part 2: Comparative analysis of salient features

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the relationship between death spikes and birth troughs following catastrophic events, introducing a transfer function to quantify the coupling and extending the analysis to annual data and seasonal variations.

Contribution

It introduces a transfer function to quantify death-birth coupling and extends the analysis to annual data and seasonal death peaks, providing new insights into demographic responses.

Findings

The transfer function is always less than one, indicating attenuation.

The transfer function follows a power law with an exponent close to one.

The analysis can be extended to countries with only annual data.

Abstract

In part 1 we identified a new coupling between death spikes and birth dips that occurs following catastrophic events such as influenza pandemics and earthquakes. Here we seek to characterize some of the key features. We introduce a transfer function defined as the amplitude of the birth trough (the output) divided by the amplitude of the death spike (the input). This has two features: it is always smaller than one so is an attenuation factor and as a function of the amplitude of the death spike, it may be characterized by a power law with exponent close to unity. Since many countries do not publish monthly data, merely annual data, we attempt to extend the analysis to cover such data and how to identify the death-birth coupling. Finally we compare the response to unexpected death spikes and regular seasonal death peaks, such as winter death peaks which occur annually in many countries.