Trio Awards

(1) To design and pilot a mobile-phone-based high-frequency survey platform to measure sexual behavior and contraceptive use among young women. The app will be used to gather weekly data on sexual behavior and contraception use in a highly anonymized, private forum. By developing an appealing, user-friendly mobile app, we will both increase participant adherence and the accuracy of this sensitive data. We will also be able to gather data at a much higher frequency than is practical with in-person surveys, allowing the measurement of how contraception use varies across partners and encounters, which will reveal which barriers are materially important to use. (2) To launch this survey to 1,000 female undergraduates at the University of Zambia and collect weekly data for 12 months, beginning in fall 2018. This population is important and under-studied: they are women with a high demonstrated value of education, and thus high opportunity cost of pregnancy. Nonetheless, focus groups suggest barriers to contraception use still persist in this group, but little is known about the actual incidence of unintended pregnancy, or it’s consequences. This weekly survey, consisting of 5-10 questions about last sexual encounter, including method of contraceptive (for users), and barriers to usage (for non-users), pregnancy if it occurs, and subsequent outcomes, will allow us to generate high frequency data on women’s contraceptive choices and outcomes. We will recruit women in their dorms using female surveyors at the beginning of the term. Each week, women will be prompted by the application to fill out the survey, and their responses will be sent to the researchers on a secure server. (3) To analyze these data to better understand the extent to which pregnancy can be a barrier to tertiary education among this population, and to document potential barriers to contraceptive use. The unique, high frequency data on sexual encounters, pregnancy, and contraceptive use across different encounters collected through the app will provide several new insights, providing evidence that could be used in the optimal design of policy and contraception-promoting interventions. Multiple observations across encounters and partners for a given woman will help disentangle the quantitative importance of different barriers to contraceptive use, including those that are woman-specific (which require access or informational interventions, partner-specific (and could be addressed by bargaining interventions, or example), or encounter-specific (which might be addressed by greater access to long-acting methods). The longitudinal nature of the data will allow us to document the incidence of pregnancy in this important population, as well as the frequency of unintended pregnancy. Moreover, we will use the fine timing of the data to document the extent to which pregnancy could be causing dropout, as well as other outcomes following pregnancy. 

Aim 1: Empirically quantify the impact of automatic enrollment retirement policies on retirement savings and total savings. Aim 2: Test the hypothesis that the perceived costs of retirement saving prevent workers from saving for retirement. Aim 3: Estimate the size of the upfront costs. Aim 4: Explore alternative optimal default policies

Analyzing motor vehicle crash data that is linked to other existing administrative data sources (e.g., driver licensing data) has the potential to catalyze advancements in our understanding of older driver crashes—an important cause of morbidity and mortality among older adults in the US. The proposed study, which includes analysis of the unique and comprehensive New Jersey Traffic Safety Outcomes data warehouse, will be the first longitudinal study of older adults’ rates of driver licensure and adverse driving outcomes (2004-2014). Findings will serve as initial analyses for a planned program of research that will directly inform and impact rehabilitation and treatment efforts, licensing policies, and other strategies to enhance older driver safety and reduce the burden of older driver crashes and injuries.

Learning about your taxes is aversive. However, when making decisions about a retirement savings strategy, about labor supply, or indeed about most financially consequential economic decisions, it is critical to have a complete understanding of the tax consequence of these actions. In this project, we aim to better understand the nature of “tax information avoidance,” and to integrate knowledge of this behavior into our models of decision-making in these environments.

A lack of safe, accessible transportation leads to degradation in medical care as 3.6 million Americans do not obtain non-emergency medical care because of a lack of transportation in a given year. The specific barriers and breaks in the transportation travel chain that limit elder mobility, particularly in their access to healthcare facilities, remain largely unknown. This project will unite transportation engineering and public health together with the goal of understanding the physical infrastructure constraints and the perceived constraints of elderly travelers as they traverse the transportation network and how these factors ultimately determine the mobility of the elderly.

The Project aims to determine whether outcomes for patients with AD are better when they are cared for in hospitals with better nursing resources (patient-to-nurse staffing ratios, skill mix, nurses’ education, and the quality of the work environment). We expect to confirm that outcomes are worse for patients with AD than for similar patients without AD. However, patients with AD will fare better when cared for in hospitals with better nursing resources. It also aims to determine whether racial and ethnic disparities in AD outcomes are narrowed in hospitals with better nursing resources (patient-to-nurse staffing ratios, nurses’ education, skill mix, and the quality of the work environment). We expect to find that outcomes are worse for patients with AD who are minorities but the gap between minorities and non-minorities will be less in hospitals with better nursing resources.

The design of pension and health care policies for the elderly requires that we understand the expenditure decisions of the old. Two fundamental characteristics of the elderly are that their health worsens with age and that it does so at different rate for people in different socio-economic groups (Pijoan-Mas and Rıos-Rull (2015)). The question that we plan to address is how do age and health shape preferences and consumption decisions. Surprisingly, very little work exploring effects of health on consumption Specifically, we aim to estimate the effect of health on the marginal utility of consumption. For this we use a model where the evolution of health is itself endogenous. However, we only need to use the consumption Euler equation to estimate structural parameters. This feature greatly reduces the complications of the process and allows us to be agnostic about how is the actual technology that improves health. We exploit plan to exploit differences in consumption growth by age, education, wealth, and health groups that provide enough variation to allow for identification. We use estimates of health transitions by age, education, and wealth that we can interpret as the outcome of optimal behavior and that provide the variation in the data necessary to produce tight estimates.

In this proposed pilot project, we aim to demonstrate that in the presence of intergenerationally-correlated endowments, the many studies that purport to estimate the effects of parental and grandparental characteristics on child outcomes are misinterpreted in ways that are likely to overstate substantially direct parental effects and indirect grandparental effects, and maybe even have the sign wrong for direct grandparental effects. By “intergenerationally-correlated endowments” we mean important factors that affect the outcomes of interest that are usually not observed in social science data, and that are transmitted from one generation to the next, such as family culture or genes. The basic purposes of this pilot project are to develop this point, summarize and reinterpret three-generational studies in the literature in light of this point, develop a model that will permit identification of grandparental effects with data on four generations, locate data across four generations, and then prepare a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant application to explore and reinterpret intergenerational relations in depth to understand better their causal nature.

Research on population aging generally focuses on a particular elderly population in a specific location.  However, a growing literature on transnationalism emphasizes that for immigrant populations, societies of origin and settlement are linked through a dense web of economic, cultural, and political connections.  While these connections hold the potential to powerfully shape aging on both sides of the border, the relationship between migration and aging remains understudied.  This paucity of information is particularly problematic in the case of Latin American migration to the United States, due to rapid population aging and high levels of need on both sides of the border.

In the United States, prescription drug spending is a large and growing component of both total health spending and overall GDP; understanding the determinants of drug spending is important from an economic perspective and as a matter of national policy. This project focuses particular attention on generic pharmaceutical pricing, and the extent to which two crucial inputs – manufacturer market structure and government intervention – determine the prices paid throughout the supply chain. In doing so, we hope to shed new light on the causal welfare effects of several policies regarding pharmaceutical competition and regulation.

To enhance the scientific value of the forthcoming 5th round of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) by collecting data on the non-resident parents of respondents in the MDICP.

The specific aim of this project is to understand how the widespread adoption of the new generation of anti-depressants known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors has affected labor market outcomes.

To develop computer programs to put Framingham Study data into a format that can be read into the demographic programs; to revise the analysis programs to increase the speed with which they process the data; and to develop a mechanized approach to scanning the results and identifying SNPs that appear to be associated with longevity.

To analyze the empirical determinants of Chilean workers’ decision to annuitize at retirement or not.

The specific aims of this project include: Create the first large-scale complete-sexual-network study with detailed phylogenetic data in sub-Saharan Africa; Use the molecular-genotype data to establish chains of HIV infection; and investigate the impact of sexual network structures on the rate at which recombinant forms of the virus, dual infections as well as superinfections, emerge within a population.

To examine how people's perceptions about local rates of infection, about their own or their spouse's HIV status, and their perceived risk of infection affects their behavior with regard to decisions to get tested for HIV, to engage in extramarital affairs, and to use barrier methods of contraception.

In the US, most employees offered defined contribution (DC) pension plans are provided a wide variety of investment options to chose from, when allocating their retirement saving portfolios. This study will investigate what happens when workers are offered a new type of investment option, namely, Life Cycle (LC) funds, which have been introduced in the last five years by pension plan sponsors.

To create the Malawi AIDS Research Database (MARD) to be housed at the College of Medicine (COM) at the University of Malawi, which will include (1) unpublished articles and reports that constitute the bulk of research on AIDS in Malawi; (2) links to published articles that are available without subscription on the Web; and (3) published articles accessible through the PSC Demography library.

To evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives in promoting weight loss among obese individuals and to use the difference in weight loss measured at 16 weeks to project the long-term cost-effectiveness if weight loss is sustained.

To determine whether dual eligibles in states with higher copayments will have lower antidepressant use and adherence than those in states with lower or no copayments.

To advance our understanding of variations in health status among native-born and foreign-born Hispanics, NH-Whites, African-origin populations, and Asian Americans, including sub-populations within these broad race/ethnic groups.

To assess the variation in literacy skills among older adults, particular the literacy gap between those with high levels of formal educational attainment and those with low levels of educational attainment.

To evaluate the effect of attitudinal, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control/structural factors on achieving sustained blood pressure (BP) control in hypertensive elderly patients aged >70 and to examine the impact of functional status/comorbidities as barriers to control.

To determine the cross-sectional relationships between weight status and SES/class and conduct cross-cohort comparisons to evaluate secular shifts in the relationship over time.

To 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.

To apply existing and develop new models of intergenerational and inter vivos transfers to explain motivations for such transfers in a high HIV prevalance county and to investigate whether transfers differ by households that are and are not affected by AIDS

To examine interactions among three generations in Guatemala using unusually rich longitudinal data over 35 years that will increase the research productivity of an existing project through added data collection that is not already funded by the existing project.

To evaluate what Chileans do and do not know about their retirement system after two decades of the new program, and, to the extent that current participants and potential participants prove under- or mis-informed, to learn what aspects of the plan seem particularly difficult to fathom and what might be done to correct the lack of information and/or misinformation.

To understand the relationship between both (a) the survival and (b) the co-residency of grandparents and their grandchildren’s mortality, based on the 1993 Gambia census.

To analyze the factors associated with the use of self-medication in Mexico using survey data on adults aged 50 and older from the Mexican Health and Aging Study

Household decisions regarding savings, consumption, employment and health behavior over the life-cycle.

Determinants of the living arrangements by constructing and estimating models where mothers and children make choices that bear in whether they live together or separate.