Physical pain is a common but largely overlooked and poorly understood aspect of the lives of the poor. With frequent involvement in hard physical labor, uncomfortable living conditions, and limited access to adequate medical care, the poor are particularly likely to experience pain (Poleshuk and Green 2008; Johnson et al. 2013, Tsang et al. 2008). This heavy burden of physical pain is likely to be exacerbated in the coming years as pain increases with age and populations are aging rapidly around the globe (Loeser and Melzack 1999; McBeth and Jones 2007).

The female reproductive system declines sharply before other aging-related health issues become prevalent; however, there has been little study to date on the economic impact of this male-female aging asymmetry. This project examines fecundity as “reproductive capital,” a depreciating asset that influences one’s financial well-being, and studies what happens when women lose this asset, and the impact of policies that slow its rate of depreciation.

Depression and anxiety (DA) are important dimensions of mental health (MH) with a significant and growing contribution to the global burden of disease. In resource-poor contexts, DA have also been widely recognized as having important implications for demographic events and behaviors such as mortality, migration and divorce, individual productivity, individual/family-level well-being, and overall economic development. Mature adults, defined here as adults aged 45+, are a rapidly-growing subpopulation with key social and economic roles for whom DA and its implications are poorly understood.

We plan to investigate how self-assessed health shapes the appreciation of consumption of people, the marginal utility of consumption. We implement the analysis using data on consumption growth rates and self-assessed health by various groups of the elderly population. The results of the project will tell us how consumption is valued in different health status and how savings responds to changes in health. An additional result of the proposed work will be an assessment of how people view that their health responds to their efforts and their out of pocket expenditures.

The objective of this project is to learn what nurses know about retirement benefits and to better understand how variations across organizations employing nurses (hospitals, home care agencies, nursing homes, etc.) in benefits and other terms of employment affect the morale of nurses and their commitments to employers and careers in nursing. This will extend previous work that has surveyed nurses to understand the organizational factors that impede or enhance the practice of nursing, with respect to (a) the job satisfaction of nurses; and (b) the health of the patients for whom they care.

In 2008, there were 19.6 abortions for each 1000 women of fecund age in the U.S. In absolute numbers, his means that 1.21 million induced abortions occur each year which account for 22.4% of pregnancies.  (Jones and Kooistra, 2011). When asked about the reasons to get an abortion, women in the U.S. often refer to the conflict between child rearing and their careers or employment (38%), their education (38%), and to not being ready to have a (another) child at the moment (32%) (Finer et al., 2005).

Over the past decade, Medicare and Medicaid programs have contracted out an increasing share of their caseloads to private managed care plans, with over 25% of Medicare enrollees and over 60% of those in Medicaid currently covered through private provision (Gold 2012, KFF 2012). Privatization of Medicaid and Medicare services has been undertaken in attempt at cost savings and quality improvements.

The proposed project will enhance our understanding of adult health and birth outcomes among black immigrants in the United States by region and country of birth. Black immigrants constitute a small but growing share of recent immigration flows. The vast majority of Blacks come to the United States from the Caribbean and from Africa. By 2005-2010, foreign-born Blacks made up just over eight percent of the U.S. Black population up from less than one percent in 1960.

The menopausal transition has been the center of considerable attention of biomedical and public health research, with hundreds of studies focusing on the physiological, psychological, emotional, and cognitive correlates of reproductive aging. These studies have been based mainly on data obtained in clinical settings or from women in industrialized, urban environments and have been framed within the biomedical research paradigm, which tends to look for universals and for normal vs. pathological dichotomies.