UM18-01: Investigating the Difference in Mortality Estimates Between the Social Security Administration Trustees’ Report and the Human Mortality Database
The goal of this project is to evaluate the mortality estimation process implemented by the SSA as the basis for its projections and to compare it with that of the Human Mortality Database (HMD), one of the most widely used…
UM18-02: Adverse Financial Events Before & After Dementia Diagnosis: Understanding the Timing and Need for Assistance Managing Money Among Households Impacted by Dementia
The number of older adults living with dementia is predicted to increase rapidly in coming years, reaching 12 million by 2050. Dementia is a degenerative clinical condition that can lead to impaired financial decision-making, raising concerns about the growing need…
UM18-03: How Well Can Medicare Records Identify Seniors with Cognitive Impairment Needing Assistance with Financial Management?
An increasing population of elderly dementia patients may not be able to administer their own finances. Identifying persons at need is a major challenge. The researchers use nationally-representative data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to Medicare records,…
UM18-05: Social Security Household Benefits: The Impact of Program Knowledge
Social Security offers two types of benefits for spouses: spousal and survivor benefits. Regardless of his or her own work history, a married individual can claim spousal Social Security benefits, which are equal to half of his or her spouse’s…
UM18-06: Validity and Reliability of Machine Coding of Occupation & Industry in the Health and Retirement Study
Many longitudinal studies, such as the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), use census definitions to code the occupation and industry of the jobs held by respondents. The codes change every 10 years with each new census. Researchers interested in tracing…
UM18-07: Local Economic Hardship and Its Role in Life Expectancy Trends
Recent research has found, in some groups of Americans, dramatic increases in deaths due to drug overdose and suicide and stagnation in previous trends toward increased longevity. Continuing this line of study, we will examine the link between mortality and…
UM18-08: Relative Sizes of Age Cohorts & Employment and Labor Force Participation of Older Workers
This research explores how changes in the relative sizes of different age cohorts affect older workers’ employment. It is prompted by the question: Does the relative scarcity of younger workers boost demand for older workers? Evidence on how employment of…
UM18-09: Using Consequence Messaging to Improve Understanding of Social Security
In this proposal, we develop “consequence messaging” — a new behaviorally motivated communication strategy in which we use vignettes to explain the consequences of decisions to people. The vignettes take the form of videos. We propose to study two related…
UM18-10: Addressing Social Security’s Solvency While Promoting High Labor Force Participation
A number of proposals and options to address OASI trust-fund solvency have been suggested in recent years. The present work attempts to examine a subset of commonalities from these proposals from the standpoint of economic efficiency — that is, from…
UM18-Q1: Social Security Coverage Around the World
We will analyze the population covered by social security programs in China, India and Mexico using surveys in the HRS family. We will answer the following questions: 1) Who is covered by social security programs? We will study the coverage…