Financial Security and Healthy Aging

Objectives: This project aims to understand how financial security affect healthy aging. Specifically, we will model the relationship between social security income and aging trajectories and estimate its causal effect. Conventional economic analysis measures health status without paying attention to trajectories of health, which contains richer information. Conventional trajectories analysis, on the other hand, often do not consider causal mechanisms. The link between the two fields will most likely generate important scientific findings and advance the discipline.

Learning Opportunities: The summer intern will receive training on cutting-edge methods in trajectory analysis as well as causal inference (e.g. regression discontinuity design, diff-in-diff, instrumental variable approaches) that are essential to public policy research. The training will involve hand-on experiences about how to estimate the trajectories in SAS and causal inference in STATA and R.

Mentorship: The summer intern will work closely with Dr. Xi Chen on linking trajectory analysis and causal inference methods in this innovative multidisciplinary research that brings together geriatric and economic methods and perspectives. This research is well-founded on recently published work on trajectory analysis and pension effect evaluation.