Trio Awards

Aim: Analyzing motor vehicle crash data that is linked to other existing administrative data sources (e.g., driver licensing data) has the potential to catalyze advancements in our understanding of older driver crashes—an important cause of morbidity and mortality among older adults in the US. The proposed study, which includes analysis of the unique and comprehensive New Jersey Traffic Safety Outcomes data warehouse, will be the first longitudinal study of older adults’ rates of driver licensure and adverse driving outcomes (2004-2014). Findings will serve as initial analyses for a planned program of research that will directly inform and impact rehabilitation and treatment efforts, licensing policies, and other strategies to enhance older driver safety and reduce the burden of older driver crashes and injuries.

Aim: Learning about your taxes is aversive. However, when making decisions about a retirement savings strategy, about labor supply, or indeed about most financially consequential economic decisions, it is critical to have a complete understanding of the tax consequence of these actions. In this project, we aim to better understand the nature of “tax information avoidance,” and to integrate knowledge of this behavior into our models of decision-making in these environments.

Aim: A lack of safe, accessible transportation leads to degradation in medical care as 3.6 million Americans do not obtain non-emergency medical care because of a lack of transportation in a given year. The specific barriers and breaks in the transportation travel chain that limit elder mobility, particularly in their access to healthcare facilities, remain largely unknown. This project will unite transportation engineering and public health together with the goal of understanding the physical infrastructure constraints and the perceived constraints of elderly travelers as they traverse the transportation network and how these factors ultimately determine the mobility of the elderly.

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: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

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

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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.

Aim: 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

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

Aim: 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.