Trio Awards

Aim: 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.

Aim: To test the hypothesis that HIV-negative individuals living in a community of high HIV-AIDS prevalence have a greater risk of contracting the disease if their high-sensitivty C-Reactive Protein is elevated > 3.0mg/L; and to evaluate the overall health of some 1000 persons living in Balaka region in Northern Malawi.

Aim: To investigate the effects of early life socioeconomic status, place of birth, and household structure on cause-specific mortality and familial clustering of cause-specific mortality in Finland during the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

Aim: To determine whether or to what extent control beliefs differ by personal attributes; to determine whether or to what extent financial well-being differs by personal attributes; and to determine whether or to what extent control beliefs mediate the relationship between personal attributes and financial well-being.

Aim: To test two hypotheses using data from a nationally representative sample of 18,102 American adults (NAAL): 1) health literacy is positively associated with self-rated health for both men and women, net of various covariates; 2) the effect of health literacy on self-rated health increases by age for both men and women.

Aim: To examine the relationship between physical activity and risk of Alzheimer's and other dementia, between physical activity and change in cognitive function from baseline to follow up, between dose of physical activity and risk of dementia as well as change in cognitive function; and to explore the effectiveness of various types of physical activity on cognitive health

Aim: To investigate the extent to which the impact of childhood disease and nutrition on adult outcomes can be captured by the more commonly-available data on height and lower leg length.

Aim: To evaluate the effect of Chile’s pension system rules and regulations on individuals’ contribution patterns.

Aim: To collect measures of health and time preference among a new sample of adults and elderly in peri-urban Durban, South Africa, with each age-stratum further divided into those who are healthy versus those who are not; to collect longitudinal measures of health and time preference among micro- and small-enterprise owners around Durban (also previously collected 2004); and to analyze relationships between health and the ‘individual discount rate’ and between changes in health and changes in the ‘individual discount rate.’

Aim: To measure the efficiency shortfall patterns in pension plan menu offerings and to characterize these patterns according to employee and plan characteristics.

Aim: To document mortality patterns in Bulgaria during 1992-98, providing the first reliable life tables and other mortality measures according to religion and ethnic group; and to analyze mortality differentials between Muslims and non-Muslims, focusing on the principal factors expected to account for lower Muslim mortality.

Aim: To examine the dynamic effects of price fluctuations on trading behavior when investors are averse toward anticipated regret.

Aim: To develop a behavioral model of decisions about schooling and work, prepare datasets, and do some preliminary data analysis.

Aim: To examine empirically the population-level structure of sexual networks and explore the role they may play in fostering the spread of HIV as well as in explaining the discrepancies observed between indicators of sexual behavior and epidemic outcomes.

Aim: To further the public dissemination of primary qualitative data to other researchers by using the Malawi project data to set a standard and by collaboration with ICPSR to promote the development of new software and/or technology to facilitate the process of anonymizing qualitative data.

Aim: To exploit the panel feature of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate income volatility directly for many individuals.

Aim: To fill a gap by quantifying the effects of the policy change on the general health status, life expectancy, and medical care consumption of Medicare beneficiaries.

Aim: To uncover the motivations underlying transfers by examining transfers patterns derived from experimental economics games combined with data derived from survey and qualitative interviews

Aim: To demonstrate the pattern of change in the DSRS and the variation in progression rates among cases

Aim: To understand the impact of intra-household co-insurance consumption commitments and precautionary saving

Aim: Variations in rates of aging and in age distributions across local areas.

Aim: Causal links between health insurance, health, and labor force behavior using MHAS.

Aim: Health disparities among the elderly and old population by socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity in the US and Mexico.

Aim: Educational and income inequality in all cause and cause-specific mortality by age and sex in Finland and the US.

Aim: Pension regulatory and supervisory structure.