LINKING PROBATE DATA TO AN ELDERLY COHORT

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This proposal is submitted in response to the National Institute on Aging's Program Announcement PAR-97-032, "Small Research Grant (ROC) Program: Secondary Analysis in Demography and Economics of Aging." The proposed research will attempt to link an existing cohort of elderly persons followed over a 10 year period to information from probe court on size and distribution of a decedent's estate. This linked data set will be used to test the altruism and exchange models of intergenerational wealth transfer. The altruism model holds that parents give wealth to their children because they receive utility from their children's utility. The exchange model holds that parens use potential bequests as incentives for their children to provide them with long term care and other services. The proposed project will be able to test these models using actual estate size and bequests, as opposed to analyzing intentions for bequests. Detailed information concerning the elderly's health status, demographic factors, health care utilization, and personal view of the interaction with their children will be used as explanatory variables in our statistical models. Assessing the success of linking probate court data to an existing aging-related data set and determining how feasible and useful this approach is likely to be in the future is also a primary motivation of the proposed work.