The overall goal of our program project and its individual research projects is to study decision-making and wellbeing using the Health and Retirement Study, exploring links between behavior on surveys and in the real world. Project 1 proposes to utilize the MRSdata about subjective probability beliefs on a wide variety of topics in conjunction with models of survey response and behavior under uncertainty to address four related questions. Project 2 proposes to use well-specified longitudinal economic models to analyze how health status and economic factors jointly affect labor force behavior as workers approach retirement age, with particular focus on the choices people make when their health declines. Project 3 proposes to bring to bear the concepts and methods of modern Economics on the traditional problem of well-being in Psychology, and the insights of modern Psychology about well-being in general and subjective well-being data in particular on the traditional problems in Economics of prediction of behavior, understanding expectation formation, and welfare analysis. Project 4 proposes to test theories about the mechanisms producing interviewer effects on self-report health data across different age groups; to invent and validate indicators of interviewer-related mechanisms producing measurement error; and to demonstrate improved statistical analyses about important age-related health phenomena by employing the measurement error indicators of those mechanisms. Project 5 proposes to analyze tendencies of respondents to the MRSfor nonresponse and response errors in answering related questions, as well as across the instrument as a whole. Project 6 proposes to identify what governs cross-sectional difference in portfolio choice with regard to risk preference, illiquid assets and behavioral finance. We propose three Cores designed to support this program of research - an Administrative Core, a Data Innovation Core and a Network core. These Cores provide an efficientway to maximize the scientific productivity of these six projects.
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