Data sets on pensions and health: Data collection and sharing for policy design

A growing number of countries are developing or reforming pension and health policies in response to population ageing and to enhance the welfare of their citizens. The adoption of different policies by different countries has resulted in several natural experiments. These offer unusual opportunities to examine the effects of varying policies on health and retirement, individual and family behaviour, and well-being. Realizing these opportunities requires harmonized data-collection efforts. An increasing number of countries have agreed to provide data harmonized with the Health and Retirement Study in the United States. This article discusses these data sets, including their key parameters of pension and health status, research designs, samples, and response rates. It also discusses the opportunities they offer for cross-national studies and their implications for policy evaluation and development.data analysis, comparison, old age risk, health status, quality of life, social policy, demographic aspect, international

Overcoming suffering for Korean college students in America through the word of God, prayer, and sacrificial service

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1913/thumbnail.jp

Franchise Market, Contract Conditions, and Welfare Implications: Evidence from Korea

This paper analyzes how franchise contract conditions are influenced by business structures as well as how contract conditions affect producer surplus by utilizing Korean franchise Information Disclosure Documents for the years 2014-2016. We find that franchise fees tend to increase in line with increases in the numbers of direct stores or the business period. Accordingly, it would be reasonable to check whether the franchise fee is excessive compared to the amount of reputation capital rather than to criticize the absolute level of the franchise fee. Regarding royalty contracts, the larger the discount in the raw materials purchase is, the higher the initial royalty is. Although this appears to be a royalty discount, it can be a means of inducing a raw materials purchase contract by initially setting a high royalty rate and then lowering it after the purchase contract is signed. Concerning the effect on producer surplus, the results show that an increase in franchise fees and royalties negatively affects the franchisee’s operating profits but positively affects those of the franchisor’s, leading to conflicts over the distribution of economic value added. Based on the findings here, we propose various policy recommendations, specifically reinforcing the contents in the Information Disclosure Document, further activating fixed-rate royalties, and strengthening the qualifications of franchisors when recruiting franchisees

Use of Financial Services and the Poor

This paper was commissioned for Inclusion in Asset Building: Research and Policy Symposium, an event hosted in September 2000 by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. The paper presents results from an analysis using data from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances to explore several aspects of the financial relationships of low-income households. The analyses looked at an updated profile of low-income and poor households, their financial portfolios, their attachment to the mainstream financial sector, and their use of various types of financial institutions. The findings suggest ways to move low-income households into the financial mainstream and ways to make financial institutions more attractive to these low-income customers

Smoking, physical activity and healthy aging in India

__Abstract__ Background: To identify levels of physical inactivity and smoking and examine their relationships to health among older people in India. Methods. I

Empirical Essays on the U.S. Airline Industry

This dissertation studies the effects of firm's collaborative strategy on both demand and supply, and equilibrium to derive various welfare implications. I explain both horizontal mergers and vertical relationships, focusing on the U.S. airline industry. In the first study, I address significant limitations of traditional merger simulations which have focused solely on price changes while constraining the set of product characteristics to be identical pre- and post-merger. To overcome the limitations, I endogenize both prices and product characteristics by specifying a two-stage oligopoly game. After estimating demand and supply system, I simulate the effect of the Delta and Northwest Airlines merger on prices, product characteristics, and welfare. The simulation results show that the merged rm tends to increase product differentiation post-merger, the higher product differentiation reduces the firm's incentive to raise prices, and the changes in characteristics and prices increase not only the merged firm's profit but also consumer welfare. I also compare the predicted to actual post-merger outcome and find that endogenizing product characteristics is essential to better predict the actual outcome. The second study investigates the impact of contractual agreements regarding gates between airports and carriers on major carrier's market power. Competition Plans reported by thirty one hub airports provide information on a carrier's gate- occupancy, sublease agreement, and Majority-In-Interest clauses at an airport. I estimate the effects of these contractual practices on passengers' utility and carriers' marginal costs. The main results show that a carrier's gate dominance has a positive effect on the demand side through passengers' utility, and business travelers have a higher willingness to pay for gates than tourists. On the supply side, a carrier's gate dominance decreases its own marginal cost, especially when the airport is congested. Furthermore, the existence of sublease agreement at an airport is likely to increase non-signatory carriers' marginal costs, whereas the provision of Majority-In-Interest clauses increases signatory carriers' marginal costs. Based on the estimates, I execute a counterfactual analysis and nd that regulatory limits on gate occupancy can reduce the di erentials in costs and pro ts between signatory and non-signatory airlines

Eliciting Survival Expectations of the Elderly in Low-Income Countries: Evidence From India

We examine several methodological considerations when eliciting probabilistic expectations in a developing country context using the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI). We conclude that although, on average, individuals are able to understand the concept of probability, responses are sensitive to framing effects and to own versus hypothetical-person effects. We find that overall, people are pessimistic about their survival probabilities compared with state-specific life tables and that socioeconomic status does influence beliefs about own survival expectations as found in previous literature in other countries. Higher levels of education and income have a positive association with survival expectations, and these associations persist even when conditioning on self-reported health. The results remain robust to several alternative specifications. We then compare the survival measures with objective measures of health. We find that activities of daily life, height, and low hemoglobin levels covary with subjective expectations in expected directions

Longitudinal Aging Study in India: Vision, Design, Implementation, and Some Early Results

India is poised to experience a dramatic rise in its aging population in coming decades, yet comprehensive research and effective policy to confront this transition are lacking. According to projections constructed by the United Nations Population Division, the share of Indians aged 60 and over will increase from 8% today to 19% by 2050 (representing 323 million people, more than the entire US population in 2011). This demographic shift will pose significant challenges. India’s traditional reliance on private family networks to provide older people with care, companionship, and financial support will be stressed not only by the increasing number of aging Indians who rely on it, but also by changing household dynamics and patterns of spatial mobility among younger family members. The Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) is intended to inform the design and expansion of a new generation of institutions – public and private – for the care and support of India’s population of older people by providing comprehensive data to the scientific and policy community. LASI is an evidence base for analyzing the (1) health, (2) economic and financial resources, and (3) living arrangements and social connections of older Indians. It enhances opportunities for cross-national analysis by adding India to the growing number of countries with harmonized data on their older populations. LASI surveys will be carried out every two years, providing longitudinal data to support research and policy development. This paper provides an overview of the conception and content of the 2010 LASI pilot survey that was conducted in four states: Punjab, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Kerala. We highlight key aspects of the field work, such as response rates and interview duration, and discuss the breadth and quality of the economic, health, and social data collected. We pay close attention to the cultural and geographic diversity LASI is able to capture, and bring to light interesting patterns in, and relationships among, measures of health, social connectedness, labor force participation, and hardship among the elderly.aging, longitudinal, India

Does Retirement Make you Happy? A Simultaneous Equations Approach

Continued improvements in life expectancy and fiscal insolvency of public pensions have led to an increase in pension entitlement ages in several countries, but its consequences for subjective well-being are largely unknown. Financial consequences of retirement complicate the estimation of effects of retirement on subjective well-being as financial circumstances may influence subjective well-being, and therefore, the effects of retirement are likely to be confounded by the change in income. At the same time, unobservable determinants of income are probably related with unobservable determinants of subjective wellbeing, making income possibly endogenous if used as control in subjective wellbeing regressions. To address these issues, we estimate a simultaneous model of retirement, income, and subjective well-being while accounting for time effects and unobserved individual effects. Public pension arrangements (replacement rates, eligibility rules for early and full retirement) serve as instrumental variables. We use data from HRS and SHARE for the period 2004-2010. We find that depressive symptoms are negatively related to retirement while life satisfaction is positively related. Remarkably, income does not seem to have a significant effect on depression or life satisfaction. This is in contrast with the correlations in the raw data that show significant relations between income and depression and life satisfaction. This suggests that accounting for the endogeneity of income in equations explaining depression or life satisfaction is important

Dimensions of Subjective Well-Being

Using the American Life Panel, we conduct an experiment to investigate the relations between various evaluative and experienced well-being measures based on the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, the Gallup Wellbeing Index, and a 12-item Hedonic Well-Being module. We find that all evaluative measures load on the same factor, but the positive and negative experienced affect measures load on different factors. We find evidence of an effect of response scales on both the estimated number of underlying factors and their relations with demographics. We conclude that finer scales allowing more nuanced answers offer more reliability