Our project seeks to evaluate how UI differentially affects older versus younger workers’ labor supply and the impact of UI extensions (and their removal). Our results will improve understanding of how people with heterogeneous characteristics respond differently to policy changes. If the proposed aims are achieved, the results can provide guidance to policymakers on designing more effective UI policies in future recessions.
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.
Mental health, and specifically depression and anxiety, is a particularly important subset of non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan African low-income countries. This project will help understand the determinants and consequences of poor mental heath and depression/anxiety in sub-Saharan African lowincome countries. The knowledge gained as part of this project has the potential to help societies to improve the mental well-being of mature adults in context where the public health system is likely to remain inadequate to provide support for depression/anxiety and poor mental health.
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.
Policies related to aging often seek to support wellbeing among individuals who may have lower human capital or ability to participate in the labor force and declining financial assets. The asymmetric aging of the reproductive system may have important distributional impacts on older individuals, leading to older women having fewer avenues for financial support (since they may no longer be considered eligible marriage partners). By studying a policy that aimed to ameliorate the impact of aging on women’s ability to have children through access to IVF and other medical interventions, this project contributes to measuring the scope for policymakers to address the gender-specific impacts of aging, and, in particular, how such policies may lead to women making different decisions earlier in life, due to the later-life insurance provided by access to assisted reproduction technologies.
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.