Ronald Lee, Ph.D. - US grants

This project will investigate two grand themes in macro-demographic theory: that homostatic mechanisms have led human populations to equilibrate with resources (as mediated by culture and technology), and that technological change is itself spurred by increases in population. These theories will be further developed and systematized at a formal level, with careful attention to the roles of randomness and exogenous variation, age distribution fluctuations, the integration of the two theories, and the problems of estimation and inference from both temporal and cross-sectional data. The project is interdisciplinary; while its core is economic demography, it will draw on related research in historical demography, economic history, statistics, anthropology and perhaps animal population biology. The method is to specify mathematical models embodying the theories and incorporating disturbances; to analyze the dynamic behavior of these models using phase diagrams, characteristic roots, theoretical cross-spectral variables and other procedures; and where possible to estimate the models from historical and contemporary data. These theories are central to our view of the long sweep of human history, and increasingly to our view of the human future. In them, the determinants and consequences of fertility and mortality, two health-related variables, play a central role.

This research is to study and develop formal models of bureaucratic communications. Application is to the development of artificially intelligent bureaucratic communication networks that can reason and advise about bureaucratic rules and procedures, monitor and expedite message handling, utilize heuristics to circumvent procedural breakdowns, accommodate exception handling, and facilitate adaptation and evolution of bureaucratic rule structures. The research focuses on structured communications within bureaucracies; that is, communications having a bounded syntax and vocabulary (e.g., bureaucratic forms, verifications, requests). The purpose is to understand the basic nature of these communications, and to reduce them to symbolic form, amenable to machine reasoning. A logic-based representation of bureaucratic messages and communication is proposed. The significance of the research is that it will lead to a deeper understanding of the role and limitations of bureaucratic rationalization, and the potential application of artificial intelligence technology in bureaucracies.

vital statistics; human population dynamics; human mortality; human population study; mathematical model; model design /development; model; fertility; computer simulation;

It is proposed to establish a highly interdisciplinary Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging. The Center will have thirteen members drawn from Demography, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Public Policy, Statistics and Biology. This distinguished group of researchers includes three members of the National Academy of Sciences, and recipients of many other honors and prizes. Center members hold 7 current NIA grants, and two NSF grants on aging related topics. (In addition, they currently hold two NICHD funded grants for aging related research, both of which will expire before the Center starts, and numerous federal and non- federal grants for non-aging related research.) Their current funded research on aging clusters around two themes: 1) analysis and forecasting of mortality and population at both the aggregate and micro levels; 2) life cycle planning, asset accumulation and interage transfers as motivated by needs in old age. With Center Core B support, members will establish a third theme; 3) elderly health status and health care utilization. The Center will lead to more efficient and better research by a) providing infrastructural support for computing and data access, infrastructure which will effectively exploit economies of scale; b) facilitating and encouraging interactions among the members from diverse departments; c) supporting new research initiatives through Core B funding of pilot projects; and d) encouraging innovation and creativity by providing Core A resources to pursue spur of the moment ideas while they are fresh. It is also an important goal of the Center to increase research activities on aging among social scientists at Berkeley including non-members of the Center (and perhaps at other local institutions). Berkeley has a highly successful and well-funded interdisciplinary training program in Demography, and is planning to submit a training grant proposal to NIA this Spring; it has already trained several researchers in aging.

Leading goals of the Center are to facilitate the development of innovative research directions with potentially high scientific payoffby members; to assist and encourage researchers not currently engaged in research on aging to become engaged; and to encourage and facilitate the entry of new young researchers into the field. Meeting these three goals should also contribute to a fourth - to generate R01, R03, P01, and other proposals to NIA and other federal agencies. This Core, which funds pilot research projects, is the main instrument by which these goals may be achieved, and it is therefore extremely important to the success of the Center. The Core Leader will twice yearly invite the members to submit proposals, and at times solicit proposals. He will then triage them: some he will reject, some he will send back with suggestions for revision, and some he will forward as is to the administrative Core for evaluation and decision. The administrative Core will send the proposal to the Advisory Committee, who will respond by email, and if necessary discuss the proposal by phone or email. A decision will be made on whether to fund, and at what level. Once these decisions have been made, they will be communicated to the Academic Coordinator who will arrange for actual funding through the other administrative Core staff. Pilot funding recipients will provide a brief write-up of results when the project is completed. Titles and descriptions of past and on-going pilot projects will be posted on the web when they are funded. The brief write-ups of results will be posted on the CEDA website. A description of results and outcomes of the pilot projects will be included in the next annual report to NIA. Four pilot proposals are included here. The pilot projects will draw on the administrative, programming and data access resources of the administrative Core, and in some cases on the external innovative network Core for placement of data or software on the web.

Resources are reallocated across age and over time for many reasons, including the need to provide for childhood and old age; impatience to consume; the interest rate incentive for waiting to consume; the desire to leave bequests; the wish to hedge against risk; the desire to invest in children; the ability of parents to appropriate the labor services of their children; and the uncertainty of survival. Aggregate reallocations across age have never been studied in a comprehensive way, theoretically or empirically; this project aims to do so, building on work in mathematical demography, aging, economic demography, and overlapping generation models. The project will show that there are only four general types of age reallocation system, of which only three types appear important: capital accumulation, credit transactions, and interage transfers. Properties of each type of system will be studied. Each system generates average age specific wealth, the difference between the present value of expected future allocations into the system and receipts from it. However, when averaged over the population as a whole, aggregate credit must be zero, and the total societal demand for wealth, W, must be met by total holdings of capital, K, and transfer wealth, T. Each type of reallocation takes place through three channels: the family, the market, and the public sector. The project uses this framework to integrate selected themes in the literature including the demography of pension systems, overlapping generation models, economic-demography growth models with age structured populations, life cycle savings, bequest theories of savings, consequences of population aging, generational accounting, optimal population growth rates, public sector externalities to childbearing, and effects of demographic change on aggregate saving. Guided by the formal analysis, an accounting framework for measuring these interage allocations will be developed. It will be used to describe and summarize transfers, capital formation, and credit transactions through the family, the public sector and financial markets for the U.S. in various time periods, based mainly on the CES, and for several Third World populations, based on MFLS2 and Living Standards Surveys. Using a synthetic cohort method under steady state assumptions, these estimates reveal patterns of reallocation across ages; provide a decomposition of total age specific and societal wealth; provide comparative static estimates of the effects of population aging from low fertility or rom low mortality; indicate whether the net direction of reallocations is upwards or downwards by age for W and each form of T; and provide other descriptive measures of theoretical and policy interest. Dropping the steady state assumptions, additional empirical analyses develop longitudinal estimates of reallocations. Other work examines the consequences of dynamic (as opposed to comparative static) demographic change operating through the reallocation systems, and calculates probability distributions for the impact of future demographic change in the US on taxes or benefits for public sector transfers.

See instructions): Berkeley is widely recognized as one of the leading centers of demographic training and research in the US and the world, and is particularly known for its trainingin the economics and demography of aging. Our graduates hold academic positions at leading universitiesand demographic research centers in the departments of sociology, economics, anthropology, demography, history, public health and statistics. The 13 training faculty include a Noble Laureate in Economics, 3 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 Mindel C. Sheps Award and one Clogg Award recipients, 2 John Bates Clark Medal recipient, and holders of many other honors and awards. Three training faculty have primary appointments in the Department of Demography, 6 in Economics, 2 in Public Health, and 2 in the Business School. The heart of the program lies in the Department of Demography, but the program is deeply interdisciplinary and draws additionalstudents and trainees from economics and public health, and occasionally from Biology, Sociology and Public Policy. Some trainees get a PhD in Demography per se. Others earn the PhD in another field but do course work in Demography where they either earn the MA or do a specialized field, often while supported on the traininggrant. The Demography faculty has a strong tilt towards formal demography, and mathematical and statistical modeling,with applicationsto evolutionary biodemography, simulation, forecasting, and mortality analysis.All Demography Ph.D. students must to do an MA in an outside department of their choice. Time from entry to Ph.D. is typically 4 to 6 years. Trainees typically receive T32 support for up to four years for Demography Ph.D. trainees, and up to two years for trainees from the other units listed above. Occasionally trainees have T32 support at program entry, but most are recruited for the T32 after their first or second years. Support is requested for four predoctoral trainees and no postdoctoral trainees as in the past. RELEVANCE (See instructions): Population aging raises the prevalence of aging related illnesses and behaviors, and thereby stresses public and private support systems for the elderly including Medicare, Institutional Medicaid, Social Security, familial care of the elderly, and so on. Economic behavior regarding labor supply and retirement at older ages, saving and dissaving, financial decision making, and living arrangements is also highly relevant. The nrnnnssri training nrnaram deals with these issues

Resources are reallocated across age and over time for many reasons, including the need to provide for childhood and old age; impatience to consume; the interest rate incentive for waiting to consume; the desire to leave bequests; the wish to hedge against risk; the desire to invest in children; the ability of parents to appropriate the labor services of their children; and the uncertainty of survival. Aggregate reallocations across age have never been studied in a comprehensive way, theoretically or empirically; this project aims to do so, building on work in mathematical demography, aging, economic demography, and overlapping generation models. The project will show that there are only four general types of age reallocation system, of which only three types appear important: capital accumulation, credit transactions, and interage transfers. Properties of each type of system will be studied. Each system generates average age specific wealth, the difference between the present value of expected future allocations into the system and receipts from it. However, when averaged over the population as a whole, aggregate credit must be zero, and the total societal demand for wealth, W, must be met by total holdings of capital, K, and transfer wealth, T. Each type of reallocation takes place through three channels: the family, the market, and the public sector. The project uses this framework to integrate selected themes in the literature including the demography of pension systems, overlapping generation models, economic-demography growth models with age structured populations, life cycle savings, bequest theories of savings, consequences of population aging, generational accounting, optimal population growth rates, public sector externalities to childbearing, and effects of demographic change on aggregate saving. Guided by the formal analysis, an accounting framework for measuring these interage allocations will be developed. It will be used to describe and summarize transfers, capital formation, and credit transactions through the family, the public sector and financial markets for the U.S. in various time periods, based mainly on the CES, and for several Third World populations, based on MFLS2 and Living Standards Surveys. Using a synthetic cohort method under steady state assumptions, these estimates reveal patterns of reallocation across ages; provide a decomposition of total age specific and societal wealth; provide comparative static estimates of the effects of population aging from low fertility or rom low mortality; indicate whether the net direction of reallocations is upwards or downwards by age for W and each form of T; and provide other descriptive measures of theoretical and policy interest. Dropping the steady state assumptions, additional empirical analyses develop longitudinal estimates of reallocations. Other work examines the consequences of dynamic (as opposed to comparative static) demographic change operating through the reallocation systems, and calculates probability distributions for the impact of future demographic change in the US on taxes or benefits for public sector transfers.

Resources are reallocated across age and over time for many reasons, including the need to provide for childhood and old age; impatience to consume; the interest rate incentive for waiting to consume; the desire to leave bequests; the wish to hedge against risk; the desire to invest in children; the ability of parents to appropriate the labor services of their children; and the uncertainty of survival. Aggregate reallocations across age have never been studied in a comprehensive way, theoretically or empirically; this project aims to do so, building on work in mathematical demography, aging, economic demography, and overlapping generation models. The project will show that there are only four general types of age reallocation system, of which only three types appear important: capital accumulation, credit transactions, and interage transfers. Properties of each type of system will be studied. Each system generates average age specific wealth, the difference between the present value of expected future allocations into the system and receipts from it. However, when averaged over the population as a whole, aggregate credit must be zero, and the total societal demand for wealth, W, must be met by total holdings of capital, K, and transfer wealth, T. Each type of reallocation takes place through three channels: the family, the market, and the public sector. The project uses this framework to integrate selected themes in the literature including the demography of pension systems, overlapping generation models, economic-demography growth models with age structured populations, life cycle savings, bequest theories of savings, consequences of population aging, generational accounting, optimal population growth rates, public sector externalities to childbearing, and effects of demographic change on aggregate saving. Guided by the formal analysis, an accounting framework for measuring these interage allocations will be developed. It will be used to describe and summarize transfers, capital formation, and credit transactions through the family, the public sector and financial markets for the U.S. in various time periods, based mainly on the CES, and for several Third World populations, based on MFLS2 and Living Standards Surveys. Using a synthetic cohort method under steady state assumptions, these estimates reveal patterns of reallocation across ages; provide a decomposition of total age specific and societal wealth; provide comparative static estimates of the effects of population aging from low fertility or rom low mortality; indicate whether the net direction of reallocations is upwards or downwards by age for W and each form of T; and provide other descriptive measures of theoretical and policy interest. Dropping the steady state assumptions, additional empirical analyses develop longitudinal estimates of reallocations. Other work examines the consequences of dynamic (as opposed to comparative static) demographic change operating through the reallocation systems, and calculates probability distributions for the impact of future demographic change in the US on taxes or benefits for public sector transfers.

Berkeley is a leading center for demographic and economic research and training and is specially recognized for work in aging. Since 1994, NIA has funded a P20 Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging, CEDA, which has greatly enhanced research and training in aging at Berkeley. This proposal seeks another five years of support at a substantially higher level. There are 23 highly interdisciplinary CEDA members, including three members of the National Academy of Sciences, three members of the National Acad3emy of Sciences, three Sheps Award recipients, two John Bates Clark Medical recipients, and two winners of the Kenneth Arrow Award in Health Economics. Members hold 21 NIA research grants, 12 additional federal aging grants, and a total of 37 research grants in aging. Research themes include 1) demographic forecasting; 2) fiscal economic demography; 3) mortality; 4) health and health care; 5) economic demography of the life cycle; 6) biodemography. Core B will fund pilot projects and support junior researcher development; Core C will fund two conferences a year. Par I of Core A will solicit and evaluate proposals for Cores B and C and organize the resulting activities; arrange for visiting consultants, seminars, seminar speakers; write reports; and generally provide administrative support and oversight for CEDA. Part 2 of Core A will provide computing programming, and data-related services for members, pilot projects, and graduate students, and assist in other ways with research.

This proposed collaborative project pairs a senior economic demographer (lee, PI) with a junior anthropologist/demographer (Kramer, Co-PI) in a study of intergenerational transfers in a group of Maya subsistence agriculturalists in the Yucatan, Mexico. The project will draw on individual-level data, which are based on detailed time use observations and calculations of energetic expenditure and production for various activities from earlier fieldwork by Kramer. The data permit the calculation of resource flows across age within individual households, as well as aggregate age profiles of consumption and production. Additional fieldwork will collect further data on working age adults and older adults. These data will be analyzed in various ways: in conjunction with Lee's mathematical framework for interage transfers; to calculate a matrix of age-specific flows based on individual data; to estimate the effects of demographic composition of the household on labor effort, consumption and interage transfers. These analyses will address the following kinds of questions. Is the net direction of transfers in this group upwards (from younger to older) or downwards? How do patterns compare to those found in other studies (which mostly use less detailed data), and with similar food production systems? Do elders produce more or less than they consume? How does the presence of surviving children and grandchildren affect the work effort of older people? Do older, but still coresident children provide the resources that permit their parents to continue childbearing in their later reproductive years? The answers to these questions will contribute to our knowledge and understanding of age- specific transfer patterns and their changes, the economic role of the elderly, and possibly contribute to the discussion of evolutionary theories of longevity and menopause.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Lee-Carter (1992, henceforth LC) developed a new method to model and forecast mortality, using standard methods for forecasting a stochastic time series, together with a simple model for the age-time surface of the log of mortality. This method has been widely accepted and used by researchers, and is used by some government forecasters. The Population Division of the United Nations would like to use it for the mortality component of its biannual population projections, and is planning to use it for its very long term (300 year) projections. This requires new research to adapt LC a) for use with limited data and b) for an interrelated system of populations. Research is also needed to address specific issues and problems: a) the changing age pattern or mortality decline; b) the recently discovered apparent linearity of life expectancy change. This project will address these topics using the NIA-funded Human Mortality Data Base, together with other data sources. Software will be produced to implement these procedures and made publicly available on a web site. Work will be closely coordinated with the Population Division of the United Nations to ensure that it meets its needs. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will develop new methods for measuring aggregate intergenerational transfers; construct historical estimates and projections of intergenerational transfers in varying social, economic, and policy contexts; analyze the inter-relationships between public policy, familial support systems, and economic conditions; and analyze the macroeconomic and generational effects of public policy. The new National Transfer Account system will represent a significant advance because it measures both familial and public transfers, and because of its historical and international scope. These new data will be used to study the implications of population aging for both familial and public transfers, how changes in familial support systems are influencing the economic circumstances of different generations, the interaction between public and familial transfer systems, and the macroeconomic and generational effects of changes in public policy with regard to pensions, health care, and education. An international team is drawn from the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The accounts will be estimated for seven economies, the U.S., France, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia, with sufficient historical depth to analyze long-run changes in public policy, economic conditions, and family support systems. The broad historical and cross-cultural perspective will provide important new insights about alternative strategies for redistributing resources across generations. Parallel proposals with identical text, to be reviewed together, have been submitted by Lee at UC Berkeley and Mason at the East West Center in Hawaii. [unreadable] [unreadable]

This project develops a theory of why humans and most other living beings senesce, in the sense of experiencing rising mortality and declining functional abilities as they grow older. Existing theories stress either the declining force of selection at older ages, as remaining net fertility declines (the classic or Hamilton theory), or tradeoffs between growth and reproduction when young and higher mortality when old (antagonistic pleiotropy or disposable soma). Both approaches ignore the role of intergenerational transfers (from parents or others to the young) in successful reproduction. The also ignore the closely related issue of the quantity-quality tradeoff between numbers of births and investment per birth. Drawing on extensive work in economic demography on intergenerational transfers and the quantity-quality tradeoff, this project develops a new formal theory of the evolution of aging, which includes the classic theory as a special case, and has new implications for the evolution of the life cycle of humans and many other species. The theory has broad implications in other areas, which will be developed for reproductive value, perturbations of the Leslie Matrix, inclusive fitness, and functionally heterogeneous social insects, among others. Empirical analyses will be pursued for a vadety of organisms including humans. Conceptual and calculational methods for estimating transfers will be developed.

Core A. Administrative and Research Support Project Leader: Lee, Ronald D., PI Position Title: Director, Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging Department: Demography and Economics Mailing Address: Department of Demography University of California 2232 Piedmont Avenue Berkeley, CA 94720 Human Subjects: No. DNA: No. Vertebrate Animals Involved: No. Dates of Entire Proposed Project Period: Same as for entire application. Description: Core A provides administrative and infrastructure support for research. It has two subcores, Al and A2. Al is primarily administrative and manages the activities of the center while A2 provides assistance and services related to data and computing. Al includes the Center Director and Associate Director, the Computing Director who supervises A2, the Advisory Committee, an Academic Coordinator, an Administrative Assistant, and a work-study student (all at fractional time). Al organizes the activities of the Center (seminars, visiting speakers, space, staff, visiting scholars, and postdoctoral fellows who come with their own funds);provides organizational support for conferences funded under Core C;reports on the activities of the Center (simple Center Report, reports to NIA);allocates Center resources (pilot project funding through Core B, conference funding through Core C, allocates resources to Core D and administers it, access to Core A2 programming and data services, support for visitors);and provides services to members (assistance with grant and report writing). Subcore A2 will be supervised by the Director of Computing (Dr. Carl Mason). It includes a full-time programmer/data manager/data analyst (Research Analyst) (Dr. Carl Boe), and a half-time Graduate Student Researcher (GSR). A2 focuses on the computing facilities of the Demography Lab, but also includes some limited funding for the Econometrics Lab, which is used by members from Economics;The Director of Computing will coordinate the services offered by the two facilities, making sure that they are complementary and not redundant. A2 also facilitates access to data available from units such as UC DATA, in addition to data sets held by EML and the Demography Lab. It will provide computing and analytic and statistical services to individual projects, and be available to follow up on spontaneous research Ideas of members.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Populations around the world are aging, and there are growing proportions of the elderly who consume but earn little, on average, with the difference made up by public and private transfers and by asset income. What will be the economic consequences? Standard national income accounts are not disaggregated by age and provide very limited information on private intergenerational transfers. National Transfer Accounts (NTA) uses new methods to construct age specific national accounts, including both public and private transfers, based on existing data sets, and is consistent with standard national accounts. The proposed grant will establish a network for the 37 country teams currently in the NTA project, funding the core activities of Pis and staff, training, and global meetings. Ten to twenty new countries will be brought into the network and trained, bringing the total number of countries to 50 to 60 and adding further contextual diversity and variation in policies, increasing the power of comparative analyses. The Specific Aims are to: 1. Organize, train and assist a global NTA Network of country teams to estimate and analyze National Transfer Accounts based on existing data sources (secondary analyses), and increase contextual diversity and number of data points by recruiting teams from new countries. 2. Fundamentally enrich the scientific content of the accounts by estimating: longitudinal NTA, wealth accounts, accounts disaggregated by socioeconomic status, and gender/time use accounts. 3. Promote and facilitate research by the NTA Network using the data generated in Aims 1 and 2 to improve knowledge and understanding of patterns in aggregate intergenerational relations and the macroeconomic consequences of population aging. 4. Disseminate the data and findings of the NTA Network both within the NTA Network and to non-Network researchers and to policy makers. This is a Multi-PI application, with Drs. Lee and Mason as the PIs.

PROJECT SUMMARY ? CORE D Core D's role has been to provide dissemination of research, data and other outputs championed by CEDA and its affiliates. Audiences include faculty and students on the Berkeley campus, other campuses and institutions domestically and internationally, and also to government and other agencies worldwide. The rich power of its signature databases, notably NTA and HMD ? and now CenSoc and UCNets ? provide research opportunities and drive decision-making at all levels of government. The Core D Aims reflect the activities necessary to actualize its role: sharing of results, analyses, data, and software, as well as the training and modalities for taking advantage of the unique and valuable datasets that are part of CEDA's excellence. CEDA has a legacy of cutting edge work in demographic and fiscal projections and in the construction of large international data sets which support and enrich this work. For a number of years, researchers, government agencies, and international agencies world-wide have been able to use the Human Mortality Database and the National Transfer Accounts data for analysis and projections. In the past five years we have added the CenSoc historical census data, and the UC Berkeley Social Networks Study (UCNets). Core D leverages the value of these valuable data by responding to specific requests for projections, facilitating the use creating user friendly documentation and providing technical support and training, and assisting in preparation of nontechnical bulletins, newsletters and reports.