Cnaan / Marcus

Personal Attributes and the Financial Well-Being of Older Adults: The Effects of Control Beliefs

As the baby-boom population ages, adults are asked to take greater responsibility and control of their financial situation, but often are not equipped to assume that responsibility. This lack of control of one’s finances exposes individuals to financial risk in retirement, potentially resulting in insufficient income to maintain an existing standard of living and increasing the current level of poverty among older adults. With origins in social learning theory, a general measure of control was advanced by Rotter (1966) and represents the varied degree of perceived control people believe they have over their lives. Lachman (1986) augmented the general research on the psychology of control by supporting the use of domain-specific assessments of control in aging research (i.e. control over an aspect of one’s life, such as work, finances, or health). Two components of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the core survey and a psycho-social leave behind questionnaire (LBQ) in 2006, will be used to relate personal attributes, financial well-being, and general and domainspecific control measures in this study. We hypothesize that the results of this study will indicate that domain-specific control beliefs have an effect on the financial well-being of a stratified segment of the older adult population. As a result, appropriately designed interventions that affect control over one’s finances can improve the financial well-being of older adults who risk financial insecurity in old age. The results of this study will enhance the resiliency of the older American population as they face financial challenges in their later years.

Elo

Early life conditions and familial correlations in cause-specific mortality

The purpose of this study is 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. We base the analyses on a 10% sample of households drawn from the 1950 Finnish Census of Population with the follow-up of household members in subsequent censuses and death records beginning in 1970 through 2005. The proposed project is a first in a series of anticipated longitudinal analyses of individuals and families over a 50 year period. The results of the proposed project will contribute to the accumulating evidence on the associations of early life conditions on adult mortality and familial clustering of mortality. The Finnish data constitute a unique register based data set that does not rely on individual recall of early life conditions, educational attainment, occupations, and other life course trajectories.

Ewbank

Development of Methods for Applying Demographic Synthesis to Large Genome Scans

The search for genes associated with longevity is moving from the analysis of data for a small number of candidate genes to analysis of data from very large genome scans. Recently the Framingham Study has made available to researchers a data set covering about 10,000 individuals with a scan of 550,000 markers. The standard approach used by genetic epidemiologists to analyzing this type of data is to apply Cox regressions to the data on survival for a period of observation following the collection of the genetic material. A much more efficient method relies on a demographic model that can also make use of the data on genotype by age at the time the genetic material was collected. This approach has recently been applied to data for 1700 individuals with approximately 700 genetic markers. This application seeks support for an extension of the existing demographic model to make use of data on the survival status of the parents of genotyped individuals who were not themselves genotyped. We also seek support to develop more efficient methods to running the analysis which could then be applied to the much larger data set that is now available.

Kohler, H/Soldo

Biomarkers in Malawi: Inflammation and CRP

The goals of this proposed pilot are both substantive and methodological. Substantively, we wish to: One, 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-sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hsCRP) is elevated > 3.0mg/L. CRP is a very strong acute-phase protein. During the acute phase of a disease or infection, CRP concentrations rise dramatically. High levels of CRP are also associated with chronic diseases. Inflammation is thought to be a common risk factor for a number of chronic diseases associated with human aging. CRP increases with age, often to levels implicated in arterial degeneration and immunosenescence. In settings with high infectious disease burdens and high mortality, such as Malawi, environmental and life circumstances provide considerable exposure to endemic parasites and associated infections, but few studies have examined the extent to which individuals with high levels of CRP or long exposures to elevated levels of inflammation are at higher risk for contracting HIV than those with low levels of inflammation. Two, evaluate the overall health of some 1000 persons living in the Balaka region in northern Malawi. While members of this community have been previously evaluated for both HIV and STDs, no other health assessments have been undertaken. We seek to evaluate their overall health and well-being using a brief face-to-face interview and conventional biomarkers, such as cholesterol, LDL, HDL, triglycerides (a lipids panel); circulating glucose; urea, albumin, creatinine, total protein, uric acid (collectively a measure of renal function and infection); and HbA1c, a three-month average of blood glucose, a measure of glucose control; and hemoglobin. Methodologically, we wish to test the logistics and feasibility of collecting blood in a developing country with poor health and transportation infrastructures. We request support to administer 1000 Demecal™ biomarker test kits in Balaka, one of three sites of The Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP). These test kits require but a single drop of blood and yield values for 15 distinct biomarker assays, including hsCRP. This will be the first test of their use for collecting measures of population health and their adaptability to extreme conditons in tropical zones.

Mitchell/Ruiz

New Evidence on Annuity Choices in Chile: A Dynamic Programming Approach

The goal of this project is to analyze the empirical determinants of workers’ decision to annuitize or not at retirement, in Chile. An important decision that older people must consider pertains to how they should manage the decumulation process for their retirement assets. One option in the Chilean case is to purchase an annuity that provides a stream of income for the length of purchaser’s life, which requires transferring the funds to an insurance company. This protects the retiree from longevity risk, but the decision to annuitize is irreversible and there generally are no funds available to bequeath to one’s heirs. An alternative option would be to implement a phased withdrawal plan, where the retiree would retain control over his funds and draw down a particular amount each year until the funds are exhausted. In this second case, the retiree retains longevity risk and bears capital market risk associated with the investment performance. Our project seeks to understand the factors that help explain why some people buy annuities and others take phased withdrawals. Using dynamic programming models, we will measure the benefits associated with access to an annuity market in the Chilean case.

Watkins

Aging in a Time of AIDS: The impact of the epidemic on elderly in rural Malawi

The aim of this proposal is 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 MDICP has received funding from NIH to examine the consequences of AIDS-related morbidity and mortality for the adult respondents in the longitudinal study begun in 1998, including a new sample of the coresident elderly parents of the adult respondents. Collecting data only from parents residing in households in the MDICP sample, however, raises sample selection issues that this proposal addresses in a cost-effective way. Thus, the specific aim of this proposal is to track non-resident elderly parents and to collect the same survey, anthropo-metric, biomarker and qualitative data from them as from the resident elderly parents. Surveys based on prime-age adults (rather than aging surveys such as MHAS and HRS) rarely directly interview non-resident elderly. Since these may be quite different from resident elderly parents, analyses that omit them are likely to be biased.