As explained in detail in this proposal, we are requesting partial support from the National Institutes for Health to host a conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 2004. A main component of the conference revolves around coordinating, exchanging, and disseminating information, in part related to the areas of aging-related social, economic, and demographic behavior and in general related to consumer behavior in the areas of labor, retirement, and health. The conference has been titled """"""""'Structural Models of Consumer Optimization Behavior: Labor, Retirement, and Health."""""""" This conference will bring together researchers that estimate structural parameters of behavioral models in these three (3) areas. The formal meeting will allow participants to coordinate, exchange, and disseminate information relating to the areas of labor, retirement, and health in which models of consumer behavior are explicitly solved and estimated in order to evaluate existing policies, and potential counter-factual policies, that influence individual behavior. The conference will facilitate discussion of policy-relevant behaviors in health, employment, retirement, medical care consumption, aging, asset accumulation, health insurance demand, living arrangement, education, and migration. The gathering will encourage dissemination and adoption of practices that explore the robustness of the research findings from this computationally-demanding approach.
