Many decisions, including saving and spending, involve tradeoffs of current and future costs and benefits. One of the most robust finding across research fields looking at this question is that people overweigh the present and tend to ignore future consequences. Recent research in economics, psychology and neuroscience has tried to identify the mechanisms that give rise to such myopic preferences and extreme discounting. This proposal aims to further study one novel mechanism that involves how people perceive anticipatory (future) duration.

Health is an important component of human capital accumulation. An important frontier in the study of health and aging is in the role of social-economic network on the spread of conditions that affect the health of a given individual. For example, in an influential study, Christakis and Fowler (2007) find that changes in the weight of individuals is a predictor of weight changes in their friends.

The proposed research will examine population aging in Africa in the era of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Recent signs of fertility decline coupled with changing in mortality patterns in sub-Saharan Africa are generating interests about population aging. Given the economic and social situation of African countries, population aging will have serious social consequences.

This is parallel submission from the Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin. The overall aim of this project is to evaluate the consequences of changes in morbidity and associated mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa for burdens on the elderly and the care of children.

Recently reported analysis of the 1999 National Long Term Care Survey confirms the trend that disability levels continue to fall at an increasing rate among the elderly in the U.S., with the disability level falling more rapidly for blacks than for non-blacks between 1994 and 1999. Yet despite these gains blacks still suffer higher levels of disability compared to non-blacks. Geriatric rehabilitation is one of the health care interventions that has been credited with slowing functional decline in the elderly, and concomitantly lowering health care costs.

Type 2 diabetics from lower SES groups have worse diabetes control, higher rates of complications, and higher mortality rates. Significant gaps remain in our understanding of the pathways by which SES affects diabetic outcomes. Low SES is consistently associated with a number of important social environmental disadvantages including poverty, crime, and poor housing. While several studies have found higher rates of complications among Type 2 diabetics living in socially disadvantaged communities, these studies have lacked detailed individual-level data.

The principle aim is to investigate health disparities in the older population by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic groups in the United States. The analyses develop and apply random-effect and fixed-effect frailty models for the investigation of mortality differentials and mortality selection processes in mid-and late-life at adult and old ages. These methods will be applied to data from the “Berkeley Mortality Database”, the Social Security Administration, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS).

This pilot project proposes to examine household size and composition among households with older Asian Americans.Specifically, I plan to examine the determinants of dependent versus independent living arrangements among older Asian American (immigrant and non-immigrants) relative to that of non Hispanic native-born whites. Previous research has established that immigrant elderly (especially those who are less acculturated and immigrated to the U.S. more recently) are more likely to have dependent living arrangements.

This study will examine the effect of health status on the inter_generational patterns of caregiving, with special attention to issues of measurement and to the experiences of minorities. Caregiving (and care receiving) is of interest because it is an important component of intergenerational transfers, and because it can affect the health of both giver and recipient. The study will examine factors that promote or inhibit caregiving and carereceiving among adults over age 50. It will also examine how well different questions measures the extent of caregiving.

This study will extend previous analyses of trends in socioeconomic inequality in all cause and cause-specific mortality by age and sex in the United States by investigating whether these trends have been similar among whites and African Americans and by relating these findings to trends in the distribution of risk factors, such as obesity and smoking. The data come from Kitagawa and Hauser study for 1960, and the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS) and the National Health Interview Survey (1987-1994) linkage to the National Death Index for later decades.