The effect of mortality shocks on the age-pattern of adult mortality

Investigating the effect of mortality shocks on humans is difficult in the absence of the possibility to set up laboratory experiments. However, some events in the human history serve as natural experiments.
This paper aims to analyze whether sudden changes in external conditions affect the slope of the mortality curve or shift the curve upwards proportionally at all ages.
Two cases of natural mortality experiments are presented and used for the analysis: Australian civilian prisoners during WWII in a Japanese camp and the Ukrainian Famine in 1933.
The death rates of the POWs were higher during the imprisonment but the slope of the curve appeared not to have changed compared to the normal mortality regime. During the Ukrainian Famine, instead, the curves for different years of famine converged at old ages. The results found evidence that selection could be the cause of the convergence.