The overall goals of this project are first, to develop a model in which the trajectories of health/disability status, family composition, and economic resources are jointly determined, and second, to produce a computer program that allows us to explore the dynamic implications of this model using microsimulation techniques. While the importance of understanding the dynamics of health and associated behaviors within the elderly population is widely acknowledged, researchers' and policy analysts have also come to recognize the importance of simultaneously taking account of developments in the domains of health and functional status, family composition, and economic resources. However, the complexity of the outcome space when these dimensions are considered jointly are such as to make attractive the microsimulation approach, while greatly restricting the scope for analytic approaches. The model to be embedded in our microsimulation program is intended to support both scholarly inquiry (of substantive and methodological interest) and, equally importantly, to inform current and future policy analysis in the areas of income security, health service use, and long-term care policy for the older population. In order to achieve these long-run goals, our project will do the following: * Specify and estimate equations for health/functional status trajectories, nursing home occupancy, and death, using panel data from the National Long-Term Care Survey. This analysis will build on and extend existing research based on the Grade of Membership (GoM) framework; * Conduct parallel modeling efforts in the domains of kin-network composition and income flows, devoting particular attention to accounting for heterogeneity and within-family dependencies; * Integrate the results of the preceding modeling efforts in a microsimulation computer program which has the capacity to dynamically simulate life histories, focussing on the elderly population; * Develop and implement algorithms for analyzing the uncertainty attached to the output from the new microsimulation model; and * Use the microsimulation model to conduct a series of analytic studies, medium-range disaggregated projections of the elderly population, and policy analyses. The computer program to be created will be flexible in design, in order to adapt to a broad range of potential applications, and will be written so as to be maximally portable. It will also be fully documented and made available to the research and policy analysis communities.
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