Geographic Dispersion and the Well-Being of the Elderly

Perhaps the largest problem confronting our aging population is the rising cost of health care, particularly the costs borne by Medicare and Medicaid. A chief component of this expense is long-term care. Much of this care for an unmarried (mostly widowed) mother is currently provided by adult children. The provision of family care depends importantly on the geographic dispersion of family members. In this study we provide preliminary evidence on the geographic dispersion of adult children and their older unmarried mother. Coresidence is less likely for married adult children, those who are parents and the highly educated and more likely for those who are not working or only employed part time and for black and Hispanic adult children. Close proximity is more common for married children who are parents but less common for the highly educated. When we look at transitions between one wave of data collection and the next (a 2-year interval), about half of adult children live more than 10 miles away at both points, a little less than one quarter live within 10 miles at both points, and 8 percent are coresident at both points in time. Among the 17 percent who make a transition, about half of the changes result in greater distance between the adult child and mother and half bring them into closer proximity. The needs of both generations are likely reflected in these transitions. In fact, a mother’s health is not strongly related to most transitions and if anything, distance tends to be greater for older mothers relative to those mothers in their early 50s.

Non-response in the American Time Use Survey: Who Is Missing from the Data and How Much Does It Matter?

This paper examines non-response in a large government survey. The response rate for the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) has been below 60 percent for the first two years of its existence, raising questions about whether the results can be generalized to the target population. The paper begins with an analysis of the types of non-response encountered in the ATUS. We find that non-contact accounts for roughly 60 percent of ATUS non-response, with refusals accounting for roughly 40 percent. Next, we examine two hypotheses about the causes of this non-response. We find little support for the hypothesis that busy people are less likely to respond to the ATUS, but considerable support for the hypothesis that people who are weakly integrated into their communities are less likely to respond, mostly because they are less likely to be contacted. Finally, we compare aggregate estimates of time use calculated using the ATUS base weights without any adjustment for non-response to estimates calculated using the ATUS final weights with a non-response adjustment and to estimates calculated using weights that incorporate our own non-response adjustments based on a propensity model. While there are some modest differences, the three sets of estimates are broadly similar. The paper ends with a discussion of survey design features, their effect on the types and level of non-response, and the tradeoffs associated with different design choices.

Sandwiched between aging parents and boomerang kids in two cohorts of American women

Abstract In late middle age, individuals may face competing demands on their time and financial resources from elderly parents and young adult children. This study uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine changes over time in the probability of having children and living parents for women age 45 to 64. We compare two cohorts: those born in the 1920s and 1930s and those born in the 1940s and 1950s. We find that there has been a dramatic increase in the probability of having children and living parents and that this increase has been driven by changes in life expectancy of the parent generation. We further examine obligations of money and co-residence for women in the later cohort. We find that while women may not always face concurrent demands from parents and children, approximately thirty percent of them have provided support to both parents and children at some point in the past. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Sloan Foundation grant 2011-6-24

Gender and time allocation of cohabiting and married women and men in France, Italy, and the United States

Background: Women, who generally do more unpaid and less paid work than men, have greater incentives to stay in marriages than cohabiting unions, which generally carry fewer legal protections for individuals that wish to dissolve their relationship. The extent to which cohabitation is institutionalized, however, is a matter of policy and varies substantially by country. The gender gap in paid and unpaid work between married and cohabiting individuals should be larger in countries where cohabitation is less institutionalized and where those in cohabiting relationships have relatively fewer legal protections should the relationship dissolve, yet few studies have explored this variation. Objective: Using time diary data from France, Italy, and the United States, we assess the time men and women devote to paid and unpaid work in cohabiting and married couples. These three countries provide a useful diversity in marital regimes for examining these expectations: France, where cohabitation is most “marriage like” and where partnerships can be registered and carry legal rights; the United States, where cohabitation is common but is short-lived and unstable and where legal protections vary across states; and Italy, where cohabitation is not common and where such unions are not legally acknowledged and less socially approved than in either France or the United States. Results: Cohabitating men’s and women’s time allocated to market and nonmarket work is generally more similar than married men and women. Our expectations about country differences are only partially borne out by the findings. Greater gender differences in the time allocated to market and nonmarket work are found in Italy relative to either France or the U.S

Geographic Dispersion and the Well-Being of the Elderly

Perhaps the largest problem confronting our aging population is the rising cost of health care, particularly the costs borne by Medicare and Medicaid. A chief component of this expense is long-term care. Much of this care for an unmarried (mostly widowed) mother is currently provided by adult children. The provision of family care depends importantly on the geographic dispersion of family members. In this study we provide preliminary evidence on the geographic dispersion of adult children and their older unmarried mother. Coresidence is less likely for married adult children, those who are parents and the highly educated and more likely for those who are not working or only employed part time and for black and Hispanic adult children. Close proximity is more common for married children who are parents but less common for the highly educated. When we look at transitions between one wave of data collection and the next (a 2-year interval), about half of adult children live more than 10 miles away at both points, a little less than one quarter live within 10 miles at both points, and 8 percent are coresident at both points in time. Among the 17 percent who make a transition, about half of the changes result in greater distance between the adult child and mother and half bring them into closer proximity. The needs of both generations are likely reflected in these transitions. In fact, a mother’s health is not strongly related to most transitions and if anything, distance tends to be greater for older mothers relative to those mothers in their early 50s.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78351/1/wp234.pd

Radiative equilibrium in Monte Carlo radiative transfer using frequency distribution adjustment

The Monte Carlo method is a powerful tool for performing radiative equilibrium calculations, even in complex geometries. The main drawback of the standard Monte Carlo radiative equilibrium methods is that they require iteration, which makes them numerically very demanding. Bjorkman & Wood recently proposed a frequency distribution adjustment scheme, which allows radiative equilibrium Monte Carlo calculations to be performed without iteration, by choosing the frequency of each re-emitted photon such that it corrects for the incorrect spectrum of the previously re-emitted photons. Although the method appears to yield correct results, we argue that its theoretical basis is not completely transparent, and that it is not completely clear whether this technique is an exact rigorous method, or whether it is just a good and convenient approximation. We critically study the general problem of how an already sampled distribution can be adjusted to a new distribution by adding data points sampled from an adjustment distribution. We show that this adjustment is not always possible, and that it depends on the shape of the original and desired distributions, as well as on the relative number of data points that can be added. Applying this theorem to radiative equilibrium Monte Carlo calculations, we provide a firm theoretical basis for the frequency distribution adjustment method of Bjorkman & Wood, and we demonstrate that this method provides the correct frequency distribution through the additional requirement of radiative equilibrium. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this approach, and show that it can easily be combined with the presence of additional heating sources and the concept of photon weighting. However, the method may fail if small dust grains are included... (abridged)Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in New Astronom

Lipoxygenase-induced autoxidative degradation of terrestrial particulate organic matter in estuaries: A widespread process enhanced at high and low latitude

International audienceThere exists a substantial amount of research on abiotic (e.g. photochemical) degradation pertaining to organic matter (OM) in the marine realm. While recent research has shown its importance in the degradation of terrestrial particulate OM (TPOM), the mechanisms involved in the induction of autoxidation in estuaries remain unclear. In this study, we propose for the first time the involvement of lipoxygenase (LOX) activity in the induction of autoxidation in mixed waters. The observation of unusual profiles of palmitoleic acid oxidation products and the presence of jasmonic acid in suspended particulate matter (SPM) collected close to the Rhône River, as well as in samples from the Mackenzie and Amazon rivers, is attributed to strong LOX activity. We show the role played by salinity in the induction of this LOX activity and provide an explanation for the differences in estuarine autoxidation level. At high latitude, lower temperatures and irradiance favor photooxidative damage to higher plant debris and, consequently, hydroperoxide production. High hydroperoxide content strongly contributes to LOX activation in mixed waters. The high resulting LOX activity enhances alkoxyl radical production and thus autoxidation. On the contrary, at low latitude, photooxidative effects are limited, and riverine autoxidation is favored. The higher hydroperoxide content of TPOM may, as a consequence, thereby also contribute to a high level of LOX activity and autoxidation in estuaries. In temperate zones, land and riverine photooxidative and autoxidative damage is limited, unlike estuaries where we observed significant LOX-induced and autox-idative damage.

Probing the spectral shape of dust emission with the DustPedia galaxy sample

The objective of this paper is to understand the variance of the far-infrared (FIR) spectral energy distribution (SED) of the DustPedia galaxies, and its link with the stellar and dust properties. An interesting aspect of the dust emission is the inferred FIR colours which could inform us about the dust content of galaxies, and how it varies with the physical conditions within galaxies. However, the inherent complexity of dust grains as well as the variety of physical properties depending on dust, hinder our ability to utilise their maximum potential. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to explore new hidden correlations with many relevant physical properties such as the dust luminosity, dust temperature, dust mass, bolometric luminosity, star-formation rate (SFR), stellar mass, specific SFR, dust-to-stellar mass ratio, the fraction of absorbed stellar luminosity by dust (f_abs), and metallicity. We find that 95% of the variance in our sample can be described by two principal components (PCs). The first component controls the wavelength of the peak of the SED, while the second characterises the width. The physical quantities that correlate better with the coefficients of the first two PCs, and thus control the shape of the FIR SED are: the dust temperature, the dust luminosity, the SFR, and f_abs. Finally, we find a weak tendency for low-metallicity galaxies to have warmer and broader SEDs, while on the other hand high-metallicity galaxies have FIR SEDs that are colder and narrower