The authors analyze the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. They find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily...

This article examines the effects of poverty, public assistance, and family structure on school-age children's home environment and developmental outcomes.

Grandparent caregiving has received increased attention in recent years, and grandparent-grandchild families have generated several public policy concerns, including whether grandparent-led families face barriers to obtaining public assistance. The authors address this question by comparing the...

The authors present a generalized solution to Grossman's model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an "optimal" level without adjustment costs. The Grossman model then predicts the existence of a health...

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policymakers and private insurers as a tool for improving quality of care, there is little empirical basis for its effectiveness. The authors use data from published performance reports of physician medical groups contracting with...

Recall bias is a pervasive problem in the analysis of retrospective data (Shyrock et al., 1973; Ewbank, 1981). The problem is a recurrent concernin the litterature on the determinants of breastfeeding duration, its trend over time, and the effect of breastfeeding on infant mortality.

Using data from the New Haven EPESE, we examine the relationship between family structure and the risk of first nursing home admission.

To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as "do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?" A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. The authors present a life-cycle model...

Some studies suggest that people can maintain their cognitive abilities through "mental exercise." This has not been unequivocally proven. Retirement is associated with a large change in a person's daily routine and environment. In this paper, the authors propose two mechanisms how retirement...