The proposed research seeks to investigate the adequacy and characteristics of investment choices offered by 401(k) plans. When constrained or inappropriate investment menus are offered to participants, they may experience decreases in returns as compared to a benchmark efficient portfolio. The goal, therefore, is to produce a working paper which measures the efficiency shortfall patterns in pension plan menu offerings, and to characterize these according to employee and plan characteristics.

The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) established a new Medicare “Part D” that gives people access to a private Medicare prescription drug plan. The new law has particular relevance for the 6.4 million low-income Medicare beneficiaries also enrolled in Medicaid. These beneficiaries – often referred to as “dual eligibles” had their prescription coverage shifted from Medicaid to private Part D plans starting January 1, 2006.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.