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Research Programs and Projects
CHW Data
Archive
The Center for Health and Wellbeing, together with the Research
Program in Development Studies (RPDS), maintains a data archive.
The archive contains data sets and documentation generated from
studies conducted by CHW and RPDS researchers. Most of the files
are accessible only by Princeton University researchers (faculty
and students). The archive includes details on access for each data
set. Data archive
website.
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Demography
of Aging Center
The Center for Health and Wellbeing is home to a Demography of Aging
Center, funded by the National Institute of Aging. The Demography
of Aging Center, started in 2004, fosters new research on the interrelationships
between socioeconomic status and health as people age; examines
the determinants of decision-making and wellbeing among the elderly;
and explores the determinants and policy consequences of increased
longevity and population aging across and within countries over
time. An area of special emphasis is research on how HIV/AIDS is
affecting the health and living conditions of the elderly. The key
CHW faculty associates working on this project are Anne
Case, Jonathan
Cohen, Angus
Deaton, Noreen
Goldman, Daniel
Kahneman, and Burt
Singer. The center is directed by Christina
Paxson.
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Center for Research on Experience and Wellbeing
The Center for Health and Wellbeing is home to a National Institute Of Aging Roybal Center, called the
Center for Research on Experience and Well Being (CREW). The research is being led by
Daniel Kahneman, together with
Alan Krueger (director of Princeton's
Survey Research Center), former CHW visiting fellow David
Schkade (University of California, San Diego), Norbert Schwarz (University of Michigan) and Arthur Stone
(Stony Brook University). The overall objectives of CREW are to (1) develop new methods for the measurement
of well-being and health and (2) use these measures to better understand and document the experience of
aging. The measures developed will be used to analyze how different life circumstances and situations
contribute to the overall quality of life across the life cycle. The combination of measurements of the
affective experience of situations and activities with measurements of the time spent by the population
in these activities, currently collected by the Department of Labor Statistics, will contribute to the
development of an experimental system of National Well-being Accounts.
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Future
of Children
The Future of Children is a journal that seeks to promote effective
policies and programs for children by providing policymakers, service
providers, and the media with timely, objective information based
on the best available research. The journal is a collaborative effort
between the Woodrow Wilson School and The Brookings Institution.
The journal draws on the expertise of three Woodrow Wilson School
research centers, including the Center for Health and Wellbeing.
Sara
McLanahan, director of the Bendheim-Thoman
Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, is editor-in-chief;
senior editors include Christina
Paxson, director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing (CHW),
and Cecilia
Rouse, director of the Education
Research Section (ERS). Isabel Sawhill, vice president and director
of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, and
Brookings senior fellow Ron Haskins fill out the journal's permanent
editorial staff. Elisabeth Donahue, a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson
School, is the associate editor of The Future of Children. The journal
is published twice a year. Each issue serves as a basis for a graduate
course offered at the Woodrow Wilson School. Future
of Children website.
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South Africa:
Poverty, Inequality and Health
Anne
Case and Angus
Deaton, together with Alicia Menendez from the Harris School
at the University of Chicago, are conducting integrated health and
economic surveys in South Africa, to investigate the links between
health status and economic status. This work is being done in collaboration
with researchers from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton
and the University of Witwatersrand, and with WWS graduate and CHW
visitor Ingrid le Roux of the Philani Nutrition Centers and Department
of Health. The survey instruments collect data on a range of traditional
and non-traditional measures of well-being, including income and
consumption, measures of health status (including mental health),
morbidity, crime, social connectedness, intrahousehold relationships,
and direct hedonic measures of well-being. The surveys draw on recent
work in economics, health, psychology, and anthropology to explore
different kinds of welfare measures and the relationships between
them. Their work in two South African field sites, Agincourt and
Khayelitsha, is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Project
website.
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Economic
Status, Public Policy and Child Neglect
Christina
Paxson is engaged in research on the relationships between economic
factors and child neglect. This work is being done in collaboration
with Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Neil Guterman and Jane Waldfogel (at Columbia
University) and former CHW-research fellow Lawrence Berger (University
of Wisconsin-Madison). The research examines how parental resources—in
the form of parental presence or absence, time, and money—influence
both physical and emotional neglect of pre-school children, and
how recent changes in welfare policies influence neglect. The study
is collecting data on child neglect as part of the Fragile Families
and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort study directed by Sara
McLahanan. The research is funded by a grant from the National
Institute of Child Health and Development. Project
website.
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Udaipur Health Survey
Angus
Deaton, together with collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Esther
Duflo at MIT, Jishnu Das at the World Bank, and Seva Mandir in Udaipur,
is investigating health and economic status among rural households
in the Udaipur district of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Members
of around 1,000 households in 100 villages were surveyed, and asked
about their economic activities, physical and mental health status,
and experiences with healthcare. Complementary surveys collected
information about village infrastructure and about the clinics and
medical personnel that people use, including traditional healers.
One aim of the study is to discover more about the quality of healthcare,
how well it serves the people who use it, and the extent to which
it contributes to health status. More broadly, the study aims to
improve our understanding of the determinants of health, as well
as the relationships between health and economic status, and how
they work together to determine wellbeing. Project
website.
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College Education and Health
Christina
Paxson, together with Cecilia
Rouse and Adriana
Lleras-Muney, is studying the impact of education on health
outcomes and behaviors among young adults. This work is being done
in collaboration with the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation
(MDRC). The study has added a health component to an assessment
of a new and unique education intervention, the Opening Doors experiment.
Opening Doors will provide 4,400 economically disadvantaged young
adults in a set of community colleges across the country with financial
assistance, mentoring and curricular enhancements, all aimed at
increasing levels of educational attainment. Approximately 3,600
controls will not receive program benefits but will be followed
over time. Randomization of individuals into treatment and control
groups will make it possible to identify the causal effects of educational
attainment on health outcomes and behaviors. The study will assess
how the intervention affects health and health behaviors in the
short run; how initial health affects progression through college;
and whether the intervention ameliorates adverse effects of initial
health on educational attainment. This project is funded by the
National Institutes of Health.
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From R&D to Patient Health: Studying the Orphan Drug Act
This project studies the mechanisms through which the Orphan Drug Act (ODA) benefits health and affects firm investment decisions. The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) was passed in 1983 to encourage R&D into drugs that treat rare diseases by providing incentives for R&D into rare disease drugs. Most significantly, it provides the sponsor of an orphan drug with marketing exclusivity, and a tax credit on its clinical trials expenses. Using a novel data set Wesley Yin has collected on clinical trials of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, he is estimating the impact of the ODA on clinical trials for rare disease drugs, and on final marketed products. To quantify these separate mechanisms, he distinguishs between new drug development and marketing of existing products for orphan indications. R&D for new products leads to new drug innovations for patient consumption. Clinical trials for existing products benefits patients through information of new therapeutic uses, through tailoring dosages appropriate for the orphan population, and through expansion of insurance coverage for previously off-label drug use. The ODA's impact on each of these pathways will be separately estimated. Finally, Wesley Yin is studying the mechanism through which the incentives of the ODA affect firm investments. Stylized facts suggest that the incentives are not working through standard price and revenue mechanisms. Firm structure and financing constraints may be interacting with the incentives of the ODA. These interactions are important to understand, as the characteristics of a firm's capital structure will dictate the types of incentives best suited to promote rare disease drug development.
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Parental Resources and Child Wellbeing
This project studies how parental resources affect children’s wellbeing, as measured by children’s health status and their cognitive, social, and emotional development. The first aim of this project is to examine how three broadly defined aspects of parental resources — economic status, family structure, and parental health (both mental and physical) — are related to each other. The second is to study how parental resources affect the quality of parenting (discipline, warmth, supervision, and cognitive stimulation) and material resources (e.g., home learning materials, food security, neighborhood safety, and access to medical care) that children receive. Finally, the researchers are examining how all of these “inputs,” in turn, affect children’s outcomes. A specific “case study” is on the determinants of childhood obesity, a preventable child health outcome that is the precursor of adult obesity. The study utilizes newly collected data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a new survey that follows birth cohorts of 3,675 children born to unwed parents, and 1,125 children born to married parents, from twenty US cities in fifteen states, from birth to age four. A key advantage of this survey is that it tracks and collects information from fathers, including those who do not live with their children. Using the Fragile Families data, it is possible to study the role of fathers in children’s health and developmental outcomes. The project also uses data from other surveys, including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Health Interview Survey. The results of this research provide valuable information on the determinants of children’s wellbeing, and the mechanisms through which parental resources affect children’s outcomes. Project
website.
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