The Past Context: Supplementing Survey Data on Aging

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests support for two years to enhance recently gathered survey data on aging in Mexico using secondary data. The goal of this pilot project is to explore the idea of supplementing household data gathered through personal interviews in late life, with secondary data that corresponds to the earlier context, capturing details of the conditions that prevailed at the time individuals made particular decisions throughout their life cycle. The aim is to evaluate the hypothesis that indicators about the earlier- life context can provide further details for modeling late-life well being, beyond what age cohort indicators can provide. The long-term objective is to prepare a research proposal that will use the constructed data in more detail. The goal of that future project will be to examine the effect on late-life well being of early-life labor force and fertility decisions of women, and human capital investment in children's education. To accomplish the goal of this pilot project, we use household data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), and link the information on individuals aged 50 or more in 2001 with historical secondary data on socioeconomic and demographic conditions in Mexico. Specific aims of this project are: a) to propose and construct indicators that capture the conditions of the context faced by individuals earlier in life; and b) to test the usefulness of these indicators in preliminary models of one late-life well being indicator, namely wealth. The products from this pilot project will be: 1) two databases containing the series of historical indicators constructed, which will be made available to the research community. One will be linked to the individual records of the MHAS data, and one will contain the aggregate historical data in a flexible format. 2) A paper describing the MHAS cohorts and their respective historical context; and 3) a paper summarizing our conclusions on whether the series of indicators can contribute significant information based on preliminary, basic models of late-life wealth.