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I. Introduction
A. Mortality Compression
It has been over three decades since Fries (1980) introduced the
concept of mortality compression in 1980 and offered the United
States as an example. Mortality compression refers to the increasing
concentration of deaths at older ages along with the phenomenon of
the increasingly rectangular survival curve. Cheung and her
colleagues have investigated trends associated with age of death and
the variability around age at death within or between nations to
better understand mortality compression over time (Cheung &
Robine, 2007; Cheung, Robine, & Caselli, 2008). The most
common explanation for the increase in age at death and the
concentration of deaths at older ages focuses on differentials in
socio-economic developments over time, such as the advancement
of technology, the improved socio-environment, living conditions of
the elderly and their access to health care, and developments in/of
schooling and medical progress (Brown et al., 2012; Cheung et al.,
2008). Along with increased longevity, deaths were also
redistributed from earlier to later ages during the epidemiologic
transition, and mortality was therefore compressed into a smaller
and later portion of life, which gradually caused the progressive
“rectangularization” of the survival curves (Fries, 1980, 1983, 2000).
B. Education and Mortality Compression
Consistent evidence for the strong association between
education and mortality has been provided in previous studies. Since
the work of Kitagawa and Hauser (1973), much research has found
that better educated people are more likely to have better health and
longer lives (Mirowsky & Ross, 2003; Ross & Wu, 1995).
Longitudinal studies on the elderly also document that educational
attainment is associated with the onset and recovery of ill health
(Herd, Goesling, & House, 2007; Jagger, Matthews, Melzer,