Hyunjoon Park and Emily Hannum in the Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center would like to request support for the 2015 Summer Conference of Research Committee 28 (RC28, Social Stratification and Mobility) of the International Sociological Association, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania, August 17-19. Specifically, we would like to ask for TRIO support to sponsor sessions related to aging, life course, and inter-generational wealth transfers and savings in the three-day conference.

In this project, we estimate the incidence effects of two types of exogenous shocks to the U.S. pharmaceutical market – supply shocks due to nationwide changes in pharmaceutical production market structure, and demand shocks further along in the supply chain induced by changes in regulated prescription drug coverage requirements. We study these effects in the market for prescription drugs purchased by enrollees in Medicare Part D.

Depression and anxiety (DA) are important dimensions of mental health (MH) with a significant and growing contribution to the global burden of disease. In resource-poor contexts, DA have also been widely recognized as having important implications for demographic events and behaviors such as mortality, migration and divorce, individual productivity, individual/family-level well-being, and overall economic development. Mature adults, defined here as adults aged 45+, are a rapidly-growing subpopulation with key social and economic roles for whom DA and its implications are poorly understood.

We plan to investigate how self-assessed health shapes the appreciation of consumption of people, the marginal utility of consumption. We implement the analysis using data on consumption growth rates and self-assessed health by various groups of the elderly population. The results of the project will tell us how consumption is valued in different health status and how savings responds to changes in health. An additional result of the proposed work will be an assessment of how people view that their health responds to their efforts and their out of pocket expenditures.

The objective of this project is to learn what nurses know about retirement benefits and to better understand how variations across organizations employing nurses (hospitals, home care agencies, nursing homes, etc.) in benefits and other terms of employment affect the morale of nurses and their commitments to employers and careers in nursing. This will extend previous work that has surveyed nurses to understand the organizational factors that impede or enhance the practice of nursing, with respect to (a) the job satisfaction of nurses; and (b) the health of the patients for whom they care.

Black migrants represent a small but growing share of recent migration flows from foreign countries to the United States.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), national health reform passed in 2010, is intended to expand health insurance coverage to near-universal levels. While unprecedented on the national level, a similar reform was implemented in Massachusetts in 2006. The Massachusetts health reform and the PPACA are nearly identical in their key elements.

The menopausal transition has been the center of considerable attention of biomedical and public health research, with hundreds of studies focusing on the physiological, psychological, emotional, and cognitive correlates of reproductive aging. These studies have been based mainly on data obtained in clinical settings or from women in industrialized, urban environments and have been framed within the biomedical research paradigm, which tends to look for universals and for normal vs. pathological dichotomies.

The main goal of this pilot study is to develop a comparative database of captive and wild owl monkeys (Aotus spp.) and titi monkeys (Callicebus spp.), two monogamous primates that show striking similarities with humans in their relatively slow life history, extent of sexual dimorphism and social organization (e.g. pair bonds, biparental care).

This project will evaluate whether and how ambiguity or uncertainty aversion influences economic decision making. Risk is different from ambiguity, where the former refers to stochastic events with known outcome probabilities, and the latter refers to stochastic events where the probabilities are unknown. Ellsberg (1961) suggested that, on average, people are averse to uncertainty, strongly preferring risks with known probabilities over those with uncertain likelihoods.