Life Course Wealth, Health and Mortality in the PSID

Investigators:   Frank P. Stafford, Robert F. Schoeni

We propose three expansions of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) which would enhance the study's analytic value for research on life course wealth and health: (1) seven minutes of questions on wealth and active savings; (2) four minutes of questions on pensions of the head and wife, and subsequent employer pension plan data collection and coding; and (3) the planning of new PSID health measures and implementation of a health data validation study. Research benefits of these expansions of the PSID include: (a) providing analysts with the first reliable micro-level data series on change in savings and, in combination with income data, change in consumption; (b) providing data on change in wealth over the period 1994-99, a time when returns to financial and closely held family business investments were even higher and possibley more dispersed across households than during the period covered in the previous PSID weath intervals (1984-89 and 1989-94) and the Survey of Consumer Finance panel interval (1983-1989): (c) providing repeated measurements of wealth and active savings prior to and during important transitions such as retirement, particularly since the PSID heads and wives include almost 5,000 "baby boomers" (born 1945-1964) (d) providing hundreds more linked observations on the wealth of elderly parents and their adult children with measures of inheritance and other transfers; (e) measuring wealth for the first time for the newly-added PSID sample of post-1968 immigrant households; and (f) complementing the NIA-funded health data already being collected as part of the PSID core interview, with questions for both husbands and wives across the full age range (much of the prior health data have been restricted to those over age 55)

Funding Period: 09/01/2003 to 05/31/2007

PSC Research Themes:

Health Conditions, Disability (Health, Disability, and Mortality)
Income Inequality and Poverty (Human Capital, Labor and Wealth)
Transitions from School to Work, Work to Retirement (Human Capital, Labor and Wealth)


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