The project will expand data to be collected under an existing PARC Administrative Supplement (AS) for investigating Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD) in a context different from current HRS International Sister Studies. The PARC AS will cover adding the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) for 1000 respondents to the ongoing Chilean Social Protection Survey (SPS). The Quartet project will cover 250 additional respondents. The SPS is a stratified random national longitudinal sample of ~20,000 adults 18+ years old originating in 2002, with six follow-ups.

Numerous models have been proposed to explain why people offered access to pension plans tend to adhere to defaults when included as part of a retirement system design (Carroll et al. 2009; Bernheim et al. 2015; Goldin and Reck, 2017). Our work seeks to explore how people respond to alternative default policies, and also how default polices could be designed to achieve social optima.

It has long been recognized that cognitive skills are important determinants of labor market success (Becker (1964); Griliches (1977)), but there is increasing evidence that noncognitive skills also play a salient role. For example, Heckman et al. (2010) analyze direct measures of both cognitive and noncognitive skills that were gathered as part of the Perry Preschool Program evaluation. They find that the ability to plan and to exert self-control significantly affect lifetime earnings and employment outcomes for males.

Long-term care costs are increasing globally, but especially in China where economic development and family planning policies have resulted in rapid population aging. In 2015, one in five older persons aged 65+ globally lived in China, while in 2050 one in four elderly–over 370 million people–will be Chinese. China’s old age dependency ratio was 13% in 2015, but will be close to 50% by mid-century (United Nations, 2015). The need for long-term care services in China is already large and will continue growing rapidly in the future.

Many of our most consequential decisions are influenced by the taxes we face. When comparing different options for retirement savings, for example, individuals must account for potentially different tax consequences of different savings options. When considering two employment opportunities in different states, workers must compare not only the wage and benefits packages, but also the different tax rates. When deciding whether or not to work an extra shift, workers must consider how much of the extra wage will make it to their pockets post-tax.

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.

In this project, we estimate the incidence effects of two types of exogenous shocks to the U.S. pharmaceutical market – supply shocks due to nationwide changes in pharmaceutical production market structure, and demand shocks further along in the supply chain induced by changes in regulated prescription drug coverage requirements. We study these effects in the market for prescription drugs purchased by enrollees in Medicare Part D.

In recent years, social scientists have increasingly become interested in the effects of grandparents on grandchildren’s demographic, educational and occupational outcomes, leading to the burgeoning literature on multigenerational effects. The growing interest in multigenerational effects reflects the aging trend and growing economic inequality under which grandparents’ roles for grandchildren’s demographic, educational, and economic outcomes may be increasingly relevant.

Prior research has shown that unemployment insurance (UI) reduces labor supply among younger workers, but it does not seem to do so for older workers. A potential explanation for the difference may be that the older population (age 40-60) faces consumption commitments in the form of goods involving transaction costs, so they are constrained from changing their consumption patterns frequently. The objective of this project is to investigate the effects of consumption commitments on labor supply and welfare.