Behrman

Resource Flows Among Three Generations in Guatemala: Supplementary Analysis and Data Collection

Rising life expectancy and falling fertility rates are leading to marked increases in the proportion of elderly persons worldwide. This phenomenon has received relatively little attention in many developing countries despite the fact that the proportion of the elderly in developing countries is predicted to treble by 2050. This increase coincides with slow progress in many developing countries in addressing poor levels of nutrition, schooling and health amongst young people. We are undertaking an “intergenerational” study to advance understanding of the roles played by public policy, private resources, preferences, exogenous shocks and markets – and the interactions amongst these factors – in the allocation of resources, and the consequences for well-being of these allocations, across three generations in Guatemala. A unique feature of the study is that it builds upon more than 35 years of data collection that is rich in information about home environment, growth, cognitive development, diet and morbidity. We will have data on the allocation of resources across three generations: G1 (elderly parents), G2 (their children, most of whom are now “middle-generation” parents) and G3 (grandchildren of G1). This is the first study to link prospectively collected data on investments in children’s human capital with subsequent interactions and investments between these individuals when they are adults, their offspring and their aging parents. This proposal requests supplementary funding for the on-going work summarized above to order to (1) expand the number of G1 subjects to be interviewed; (2) include an additional survey instrument, Ravens Progressive Matrices, to be administered to G3s; and (3) support the participation for six weeks in the data collection process of Erica Soler Hampejsek, a first-year Demography graduate student. These processes, further, will permit expanded networking with our colleagues in Guatemala. The result will be a significantly enriched data set for investigation of interactions among three generations in Guatemala, involvement of Soler-Hampejsek in this research project as part of her graduate research, and extended networking with our Latin American colleagues on this project in Guatemala.

Chang

Body Capital and Socioeconomic Mobility

In the context of a cultural economy that values thinness over fatness along moral and aesthetic dimensions, the body can serve as a repository for individual differentiation and status distinctions. Moreover, bodily form can affect life chances, operating, like cultural capital, as an informal basis for contemporary social closure practices, which function to delimit individual attainments. Preliminary data from economic studies have shown that weight status can affect attainments ranging from education level to wages and household income (Averett and Korenman 1996; Cawley 2000; Gortmaker et al. 1993; Register and Williams 1990; Sargent and Blanchflower 1994). Hence, weight status is not just a matter of health; it also is a matter of social status and a potential source of capital for socioeconomic attainments and individual mobility. This project will use data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to explore the inter-relationships between weight status, SES/class, and mobility. The aims of this pilot are: to determine the cross-sectional relationships between weight status and SES/class and conduct cross-cohort comparisons to evaluate secular shifts in the relationships over time; to determine the effect of weight status on mid-life SES/class; to determine the effect of changes in SES/class/wealth on changes in weight status, illustrating the underlying reciprocal nature of the relationship; and to determine the relative contributions of SES of origin and current SES to current weight status.

Kohler, H-P

HIV/AIDS and Complete Sexual and Social Networks in Rural Malawi

The structure of sexual networks is an essential determinant of individual’s HIV infection risk and the dynamics of the AIDS epidemic. While mathematical models point to a significant importance of these sexual network structures, virtually no empirical research of this issue using adequate and comprehensive social-science and biomarker data has been conducted in sub-Saharan countries. The specific aims of the proposed study are therefore include (1) the collection of complete sexual and social network data in selected MDICP villages for male and female young adults, using sophisticated ACASI techniques to increase the accurate reporting of sexual network partners; (2) the analysis of the relationships between sexual networks, social networks and HIV prevalence in MDICP villages, including also analyses between the relationship of social and sexual networks; (c) the investigation of the relationship between the social position in sexual and social networks and reported HIV risk infection, AIDS prevention strategies, sexual and marital histories and respondent’s socioeconomic status; and (d) the development tools for the inference of complete network properties based on the local network data that are collected as part of the MDICP. The proposed pilot project is innovative in its study design and substantive contributions, and it promises to strengthen future proposals that build on the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project.

Kohler, H-P

HIV/AIDS and Intergenerational Transfers in Malawi

The primary aim of the study is to apply existing and develop new models of intergenerational and inter vivos transfers to explain the motivation for such transfers in a high-HIV prevalence country (Malawi) and to investigate whether transfers differ by households that are and are not affected by AIDS. The specific aims are to augment an existing data collection of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) in 2004, which is separate from the proposed project, with additional questions on transfers and health to strengthen the value of the MDICP for research on transfers and aging; analyze existing and newly collected data on inter-generational transfers, HIV/AIDS risk perceptions, and bio-marker based HIV-status; assess the impact of AIDS perceptions on transfers utilizing respondents’ subjective beliefs about HIV status and the objective HIV status based on the biomarkers collected in 2004; investigate transfer patterns of persons who died since the 1999 Malawi transfer survey, using information about the cause-of-death based on verbal autopsies; and develop a follow-up survey in 2005 and apply for NIH funding to re-interview the 1999 respondents from the MDICP about patterns of and expectations about transfers with a particular focus on changes due to knowledge about HIV status of the respondent and changes in HIV/AIDS prevalence in the local community.

Kohler, H-P

Trust and Transfers in South Africa: Linking Surveys

HIV-related stigma has been touted as a barrier to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. While various survey instruments and stigma scales have been developed to measure HIV-related stigma in the general population and among persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), there is no consensus among researchers as to how best to measure stigma or how stigma translates to actual financial discrimination. Also, attitudes expressed in surveys may not represent real behavior. Moreover, even if real behavior is observed, such as that someone exhibited “stigmatizing behavior” towards PLWHA, it is unclear whether this same perpetrator would interact differently with other people without HIV. This pilot study breaks new grounds by using experimental economics games combined with detailed surveys to measure whether people with and without HIV treat each other differently when money is at stake. In this study, we (i) conduct trust, dictator, and ultimatum games (well-known games in the experimental economics field) between persons with and without HIV to examine whether trust, altruism, egalitarian motives, and stigma as revealed in these games differ by HIV status of the participants, and (ii) compare the results from the behavioral economics games with the post-game surveys to construct better measures of HIV-related stigma and to quantify stigma in monetary terms.

Lucarelli

The Impact of the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill

Medicare, the main health insurer for the elderly, has recently experienced the biggest reform since its inception: the inclusion of prescription drug coverage for its beneficiaries. Most discussion of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 has focused on the cost of implementing this new policy, leaving unexplored the quantification of its benefits. In fact, very little is known about the effect this policy will have on health outcomes, life expectancy and the substitution from more expensive modes of medical care, such as inpatient care. If prescription drugs are a substitute for other forms of medical care, an increase in prescription drug utilization may improve health outcomes and reduce the utilization of inpatient and/or outpatient care; however, it may also increase life expectancy and make the population eligible for Medicare benefits larger in the future, increasing Medicare's expenditure. The previous literature on this policy issue has failed to consider the dynamic effects that increased access to prescription drugs may have on future health and medical care utilization. Moreover, the debate has been mostly based on rough approximations to the actual policy without taking into account its unique actuarial design. This project will analyze the impact of the Medicare prescription drug bill by constructing a dynamic stochastic model that is able to also quantify the long-run effects of the enacted policy.The structural parameters of the model are estimated using longitudinal data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey 1994-1999 carried by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Given the fact that the policy has not been implemented yet, and therefore, no post-policy information is available, the structural approach becomes specially appealing for this analysis, because it allows an analysis of the effect of the policy as counterfactual experiments once the behavioral model is estimated.

Mitchell

Understanding Pension Literacy

Microeconomic research generally assumes that workers are able to determine and follow optimal saving and retirement paths, and that to this end they have all the information necessary regarding the pension plan rules covering them. For instance, labor supply and saving outcomes at older ages are conventionally modeled by economists as depending on specific Social Security benefit and tax incentives that impart important notches and kinks in workers’ lifetime budget constraints. Most of these studies report finding quite small empirical behavioral elasticities, which may in fact be accurate measures of key behavioral parameters. On the other hand, these small elasticities could instead be the result of workers’ failure to understand how their pension systems actually work. This proposal seeks to evaluate worker knowledge of their pension systems by drawing on an invaluable new microeconomic survey of households linked with administrative records on actual accruals and benefit entitlements. In particular we will draw on a Chilean household survey known as the Encuesta de Protección Social (EPS). This survey, collected in both 2002 and 2004, queried respondents regarding demographic and household makeup, education and training, and most importantly for our purposes, it included a wide range of questions about peoples’ pension expectations and knowledge. To these files, we can link data from administrative records that we will use to compare participants’ self-reports with administrative information. We propose to use the project funding to prepare an exploratory report on initial findings, and to begin developing a range of econometric models of financial literacy using alternative identification strategies, including tests of the role of education in forming pension expectations.

Muermann

Anticipated Regret and the Disposition Effect

Many trading phenomena in financial markets cannot be explained by rational economic models and some even seem contradictory to each other, such as the disposition effect – the tendency of investors to sell winning investments too early and keep losing investments too long in their portfolio – and irrational extrapolation – the tendency of investors to invest too much into recent winners and too little into recent losers. The aim of this project is to understand how investors’ aversion to anticipated regret impacts their trading behavior in financial markets in response to price fluctuations and the conditions under which regret aversion can explain the disposition effect. The answer to this question is highly relevant in the current debate about introducing Personal Retirement Accounts (PRA) to the current Social Security system as empirical evidence suggests that investors with little trading experience exhibit a stronger disposition effect (Dhar and Zhu, 2002).

Preston

Factors Responsible for the Changing Sex Differentials in Mortality at Older Ages in the United States

This investigation will 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. It will investigate causes of death responsible for the slowdown in their rate of mortality advance, and will study the role of changes in risk factor distributions. Particular attention will be paid to the role of cigarette smoking histories and to obesity. An effort will be made to combine information on changes in risk factor distributions with estimates of their mortality consequences. Data will be drawn from published and unpublished sources produced by the National Center for Health Statistics as well as from epidemiologic studies.

Shore

The Causal Impact of Education on Income Volatility

Education not only impacts expected future earnings, it may also impact income risk. This pilot will examine the impact of education on income volatility. When using standard cross-sectional data sets to estimate the impact of education on earnings, it is difficult to differentiate risk from heterogeneity. This paper overcomes this problem by exploiting the panel feature of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate income volatility directly for many individuals. Differences in earnings volatility across people may simply result from unobserved heterogeneity and not the causal impact of education on income volatility. To address this problem, I plan to collect data on the location of colleges in order to construct a measure of a person's distance to a college. I will use this measure as an instrument for college attendance.

Todd

Effects of School Vouchers on Education and Earning

This project uses newly available data from the HLLS (Historia Laboral y Seguridad Social) survey to study the effects of the Chilean school voucher program on education and earnings outcomes, that has been in place in Chile since 1981. School voucher program are currently under consideration in the U.S. and have been tried on a small scale in some U.S. cities. The Chilean experience offers a unique opportunity to learn about the effects of school vouchers implemented on a broad scale. The aim of this project is to develop a behavioral model of decisions about schooling and work, prepare datasets, and do some preliminary data analysis that would support a future application to NICHD. In the behavioral model, parents send young children to private school with some probability that depends on their family characteristics (parents age, education, poverty status, number of siblings) and on whether or not theyare eligible for vouchers. Older children make decisions about whether to attend school, what type of school to attend, and work. A second goal of this project is to explore the use of a new survey currently being administered in Chile to 6000 current and former primary and secondary school teachers and to investigate the potential gains from linking these data to administrative data on test scores.

Watkins

Public Dissemination of Primary Qualitative Data from The Social Network and HIV study in Malawi

The overall aim of this proposal is 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. Demographers as well as other quantitative social scientists are increasingly collecting qualitative data, usually in conjunction with a survey but sometimes in discrete projects. Although the importance of making survey data publicly available, especially when public funds are used to collect the data, is acknowledged in the scientific community, there is no tradition of disseminating primary qualitative data. A major barrier to the public dissemination of qualitative data is the difficulty and thus expense involved in preserving confidentiality for individuals as well as third parties.