Trio Awards

Conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial with ~100 men engaged in fishing and other income-generating activities and offer 50 of them 3 months of lottery-based incentives to save money using mobile phone-based savings accounts. We will develop the prize-linked savings intervention through consultation with Kenya’s leading ‘mobile money’ service provider. We will also develop education and counseling materials to accompany the intervention. Over a 3-month follow-up period, we will compare financial savings and expenditures on key items such as food and items of interest from the perspective of HIV risk (alcohol, gifts and transfers to sexual partners, and sexual behavior) between those offered the prize-linked savings intervention and the control group. We will primarily use survey methods to measure the main outcomes and assess whether the intervention has adverse consequences.  In summary, the pilot project will assess the feasibility and acceptability of an innovative prize-linked savings intervention. It will also generate vital preliminary data on likely effect sizes and develop recruitment procedures and data collection tools – all of which will be useful for an R01 proposal to conduct a larger randomized trial that will rigorously test the effect intervention on health and economic outcomes. 

The proposed research will improve understanding of the health profile of the aging Hispanic population in the United States and shed new light on social and biological mechanisms and life course processes underlying racial, ethnic, and nativity-status disparities in health. By examining how exposure to a diverse and comprehensive set of acute and chronic stressors across the life course relates to the biological risk and physical functioning of aging Hispanics, this research will provide new knowledge of the social patterning and determinants of population health disparities and inform prevention and intervention efforts aimed at achieving health equity.

The project will advance global knowledge of long-term care delivery and financing systems, providing a new evidence base for both public policy design and private services development. By exploring a new long-term care funding mechanism, the project aims to support the development of long-term care services globally and in China. Lessons learned for China will be informative for other countries facing the challenge of how to finance long-term care costs such as the U.S. 

Chronic pain has the potential to limit the lives of millions around the globe as they age -- impeding their ability to have a healthy, inspiring, and productive life in their later years. The interdisciplinary team involved in this research project will draw on expertise in fields including public health, economics, aging, and psychology to examine the potential broader impacts of pain on cognitive function and productivity over the life course using a rigorous RCT. This research will contribute new knowledge to the understudied subject of the consequences of physical pain, providing evidence of both academic interest and policy relevance.

This project will develop and estimate a model to understand the impact of personality traits on individual’s schooling and occupational choices and the potential feedback effect of schooling and occupational experience on the evolution of personality traits. The analysis will inform about the determinants of unobserved heterogeneity, which has been found to be important in the prior literature, and provide us a baseline framework to evaluate the effect of educational policies, such as college tuition subsidy. Thus, this project helps to: (1) understand the potential causal relationship between personality traits and educational and occupational choices; (2) quantify how heterogeneity of workers’ personality traits affects lifetime earnings and inequality, and (3) evaluate the redistribution effect of college tuition subsidy policy.

The Project aims to determine whether outcomes for patients with AD are better when they are cared for in hospitals with better nursing resources (patient-to-nurse staffing ratios, skill mix, nurses’ education, and the quality of the work environment). We expect to confirm that outcomes are worse for patients with AD than for similar patients without AD. However, patients with AD will fare better when cared for in hospitals with better nursing resources. It also aims to determine whether racial and ethnic disparities in AD outcomes are narrowed in hospitals with better nursing resources (patient-to-nurse staffing ratios, nurses’ education, skill mix, and the quality of the work environment). We expect to find that outcomes are worse for patients with AD who are minorities but the gap between minorities and non-minorities will be less in hospitals with better nursing resources.

The design of pension and health care policies for the elderly requires that we understand the expenditure decisions of the old. Two fundamental characteristics of the elderly are that their health worsens with age and that it does so at different rate for people in different socio-economic groups (Pijoan-Mas and Rıos-Rull (2015)). The question that we plan to address is how do age and health shape preferences and consumption decisions. Surprisingly, very little work exploring effects of health on consumption Specifically, we aim to estimate the effect of health on the marginal utility of consumption. For this we use a model where the evolution of health is itself endogenous. However, we only need to use the consumption Euler equation to estimate structural parameters. This feature greatly reduces the complications of the process and allows us to be agnostic about how is the actual technology that improves health. We exploit plan to exploit differences in consumption growth by age, education, wealth, and health groups that provide enough variation to allow for identification. We use estimates of health transitions by age, education, and wealth that we can interpret as the outcome of optimal behavior and that provide the variation in the data necessary to produce tight estimates.

In this proposed pilot project, we aim to demonstrate that in the presence of intergenerationally-correlated endowments, the many studies that purport to estimate the effects of parental and grandparental characteristics on child outcomes are misinterpreted in ways that are likely to overstate substantially direct parental effects and indirect grandparental effects, and maybe even have the sign wrong for direct grandparental effects. By “intergenerationally-correlated endowments” we mean important factors that affect the outcomes of interest that are usually not observed in social science data, and that are transmitted from one generation to the next, such as family culture or genes. The basic purposes of this pilot project are to develop this point, summarize and reinterpret three-generational studies in the literature in light of this point, develop a model that will permit identification of grandparental effects with data on four generations, locate data across four generations, and then prepare a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant application to explore and reinterpret intergenerational relations in depth to understand better their causal nature.

Research on population aging generally focuses on a particular elderly population in a specific location.  However, a growing literature on transnationalism emphasizes that for immigrant populations, societies of origin and settlement are linked through a dense web of economic, cultural, and political connections.  While these connections hold the potential to powerfully shape aging on both sides of the border, the relationship between migration and aging remains understudied.  This paucity of information is particularly problematic in the case of Latin American migration to the United States, due to rapid population aging and high levels of need on both sides of the border.

In the United States, prescription drug spending is a large and growing component of both total health spending and overall GDP; understanding the determinants of drug spending is important from an economic perspective and as a matter of national policy. This project focuses particular attention on generic pharmaceutical pricing, and the extent to which two crucial inputs – manufacturer market structure and government intervention – determine the prices paid throughout the supply chain. In doing so, we hope to shed new light on the causal welfare effects of several policies regarding pharmaceutical competition and regulation.

Chronic pain has the potential to limit the lives of millions around the globe as they age -- impeding their ability to have a healthy, inspiring, and productive life in their later years. The interdisciplinary team involved in this research project will draw on expertise in fields including public health, economics, aging, and psychology to examine the potential broader impacts of pain on cognitive function and productivity over the life course using a rigorous RCT. This research will contribute new knowledge to the understudied subject of the consequences of physical pain, providing evidence of both academic interest and policy relevance.

To enhance the scientific value of the forthcoming 5th round of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) by collecting data on the non-resident parents of respondents in the MDICP.

The specific aim of this project is to understand how the widespread adoption of the new generation of anti-depressants known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors has affected labor market outcomes.

To develop computer programs to put Framingham Study data into a format that can be read into the demographic programs; to revise the analysis programs to increase the speed with which they process the data; and to develop a mechanized approach to scanning the results and identifying SNPs that appear to be associated with longevity.

To analyze the empirical determinants of Chilean workers’ decision to annuitize at retirement or not.

The specific aims of this project include: Create the first large-scale complete-sexual-network study with detailed phylogenetic data in sub-Saharan Africa; Use the molecular-genotype data to establish chains of HIV infection; and investigate the impact of sexual network structures on the rate at which recombinant forms of the virus, dual infections as well as superinfections, emerge within a population.

To examine how people's perceptions about local rates of infection, about their own or their spouse's HIV status, and their perceived risk of infection affects their behavior with regard to decisions to get tested for HIV, to engage in extramarital affairs, and to use barrier methods of contraception.

In the US, most employees offered defined contribution (DC) pension plans are provided a wide variety of investment options to chose from, when allocating their retirement saving portfolios. This study will investigate what happens when workers are offered a new type of investment option, namely, Life Cycle (LC) funds, which have been introduced in the last five years by pension plan sponsors.

To create the Malawi AIDS Research Database (MARD) to be housed at the College of Medicine (COM) at the University of Malawi, which will include (1) unpublished articles and reports that constitute the bulk of research on AIDS in Malawi; (2) links to published articles that are available without subscription on the Web; and (3) published articles accessible through the PSC Demography library.

To evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives in promoting weight loss among obese individuals and to use the difference in weight loss measured at 16 weeks to project the long-term cost-effectiveness if weight loss is sustained.

To determine whether dual eligibles in states with higher copayments will have lower antidepressant use and adherence than those in states with lower or no copayments.

To advance our understanding of variations in health status among native-born and foreign-born Hispanics, NH-Whites, African-origin populations, and Asian Americans, including sub-populations within these broad race/ethnic groups.

To assess the variation in literacy skills among older adults, particular the literacy gap between those with high levels of formal educational attainment and those with low levels of educational attainment.

To evaluate the effect of attitudinal, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control/structural factors on achieving sustained blood pressure (BP) control in hypertensive elderly patients aged >70 and to examine the impact of functional status/comorbidities as barriers to control.

To determine the cross-sectional relationships between weight status and SES/class and conduct cross-cohort comparisons to evaluate secular shifts in the relationship over time.

To seek explanations of the recent poor performance of mortality among older women in the United States, relative both to older men and to women in previous eras.

To apply existing and develop new models of intergenerational and inter vivos transfers to explain motivations for such transfers in a high HIV prevalance county and to investigate whether transfers differ by households that are and are not affected by AIDS

To examine interactions among three generations in Guatemala using unusually rich longitudinal data over 35 years that will increase the research productivity of an existing project through added data collection that is not already funded by the existing project.

To evaluate what Chileans do and do not know about their retirement system after two decades of the new program, and, to the extent that current participants and potential participants prove under- or mis-informed, to learn what aspects of the plan seem particularly difficult to fathom and what might be done to correct the lack of information and/or misinformation.

To understand the relationship between both (a) the survival and (b) the co-residency of grandparents and their grandchildren’s mortality, based on the 1993 Gambia census.

To analyze the factors associated with the use of self-medication in Mexico using survey data on adults aged 50 and older from the Mexican Health and Aging Study

Household decisions regarding savings, consumption, employment and health behavior over the life-cycle.

Determinants of the living arrangements by constructing and estimating models where mothers and children make choices that bear in whether they live together or separate.