Population aging, early retirement, limited retirement saving, more expensive medical practice patterns, and entitlement to income and health care after age 65: these factors largely define the economic environment of the United States. And these same forces are at work in virtually all industrialized countries. With past trends and likely future trends providing the focus, the proposed new phase of the program project has the following eight research components: (1) to assess the implications of personal retirement plans for the financial risk faced by retirees, and to assess the implications of equity price fluctuations for the decisions of older Americans. (2) To pursue analysis of the psychological determinants of economic decision-making, particularly the psychological influences on retirement saving decisions. (3) To examine individual decisions that affect health and to attempt to explain the reasons for differences in behavior across individuals. (4) To expand our ongoing cross-country analysis of the retirement and the financial implications of social security provisions around the world to consider the implications of these programs for the well-being of the old, the employment of the young, and the relationship between health status and work. (5) To extend previous work on economic status, economic inequality, and health inequality, with a new emphasis on the social determinants of health. (6) To explore the determinants of health among the older population of a poor, rural, district in India, and to develop methods to select and evaluate interventions that could improve their health. (7) To pursue dynamic analysis of the links between changes in health and economic circumstances and to develop new methods for measuring health and for describing the estimating the causal dynamics of health and wealth. (8) To explore the relationship between disability status at one age and health care expenditures later in life. The Program Project is the foundation of a substantially larger NBER program on the economics of aging and health care, with broad goals: to promote research among a larger group of economists at the NBER, nationwide, and abroad: to facility training of young economists in the economics of aging; and to expand and maintain the data bank that supports a large amount of fundamental research.
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