Local and community-level data on changing age distributions are a central feature of an industry that topped $18 billion in investment in 1996–the school construction industry (U.S. Department of Commerce 1999). Schools are built and re-built for a number of reasons, not all demographic (e.g., buildings wear out), but it is virtually impossible to borrow money to fund school construction absent a demographically-based enrollment projection or forecast.

Between 1970 and 1990 the share of elderly widows living alone grew by 23.2% in the U.S. (from 52.1% to 64.2%), the share living with their children decreased in a similar magnitude, while the other types of living arrangements remained stationary. In the same period there was a moderate increase in national incomes and a big increase in the income of widows. We pose a variety of models of the determination of living arrangements between widows and their children where living together provides consumption gains due to economies of scale, and it may also provide utility directly.

While much research has analyzed the access of Mexican immigrants to health benefits while in the US, little is known about how those who return to Mexico fare. We analyze health care access for Mexican elders with a history of migration to the US. Using a nationally representative dataset of Mexican elders, we find a robust negative association between years spent in the US and the probability of being insured. This result reflects that Mexicans who spend time in the US are less likely to meet vesting requirements in the Mexican social security system.

Creating and maintaining effective pension regulatory and supervisory structures that secure the interests of the participants and beneficiaries is crucial for systemic stability and economic growth. This paper focuses on the supervision of privately managed, defined contribution pension systems and attempts to clarify key factors that determine the setting and operational activity of pension supervisory structures.

The goal of this paper is to illustrate problems with the comparability of health indicators used in cross-national research and how cultural and validity biases may confound the interpretation of results.  In particular, the authors address the comparability issues by using self-reported health in two different contexts—Mexico and the United States.  The study design of MHAS allows for the first time to compare differences in self-reported health between a developing country (Mexico) and an industrialized country (the U.S.).

Standard models of savings and retirement put forth in the literature fall short of explaining several important features of the data concerning wealth and savings inequality as well as intergenerational correlations in wealth inequality. The goal of this project is to develop and estimate a more general model of household savings, employment, retirement, and health investment decisions that allows for both observed and unobserved sources of household heterogeneity. A key feature of the model is that households are allowed to differ in their time preference parameters.

Socioeconomic status is considered by many to be a fundamental cause of disease and death. In this paper, we document educational and income inequalities in all-cause and cause-specific mortality at ages 35-64 in Finland and the United States, two countries with different health care systems, income distributions, and social welfare programs for the working-age population. We found that education is an independent determinant of premature mortality for men and women in both countries after adjustment for age, household size, family income, marital status, and labor force participation.

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.

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 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.