This application is one of three parallel submissions from separate institutions constituting a single project. The Principal Investigators are: Hillard Kaplan, University of New Mexico; Theodore Bergstrom, University of California at Santa Barbara; and David Lam, University of Michigan. The goal of this project is to develop a theoretical framework for addressing issues in the biodemography of aging. They will build on existing theoretical work in evolutionary biology and economics, taking care to inform their analysis by consulting anthropological field studies and empirical work in economics and demography.
The first aim i s to analyze the interdependence of fertility, human capital investments, and rates of senescence. They will develop theory to explain patterns of investment in growth and skill acquisition, health and longevity, and reproduction over the life cycle. These models will build on biological theories of senescence, mammalian life history, and on economic theories of intertemporal substitution and human capital formation.
The second aim i s to explore evolutionary foundations of human attitudes toward risk, inter-temporal substitution, and intergenerational flows of wealth. They will explore practical implications of this theory for explaining human investments, risk-taking, and risk-sharing.
The third aim i s to improve the way that family interactions and sexual reproduction are treated in economic and biological models. Biologists have developed a significant body of theory regarding the relationships between mate choice, parental investment, mate-desertion, and life history profiles. Economists have developed theories of mate choice, mating markets and bargaining within marriages. These two literatures can be enriched by cross-breeding.
The fourth aim i s to integrate these models into a general life history theory of expenditures on self and descendants through time, providing a better theoretical basis for understanding age-specific mortality and fertility schedules.
