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We investigate how the genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's Disease (AD) relates to saving behavior. Using nationally representative data from the 1996–2014 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we find that genetic predisposition for AD correlates with, but is not causally related to how older individuals' hold wealth in different asset types. People with a higher AD polygenic risk score (PGS) hold roughly 20 per cent less wealth in IRAs and contribute about 24 percent less to IRAs between survey periods. We hypothesize that people with a high risk of AD choose different portfolios: (i) because they know their genetic risk of developing AD from parental history, (ii) because they have the lower cognitive capacity, and (iii) because they indirectly learn about their genetic predisposition for AD as they age. Our extended model results show that the first two hypotheses do not account for the observed correlation. Consistent with the third hypothesis, the interaction between age and the AD PGS accounts for the correlation between genetic traits and asset holdings. Our findings have far-reaching implications for researchers using genetic data: when indirect learning about own predispositions is possible, correlations between genes and choices must be interpreted with caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this study was to document exposure to alcohol advertising by sex, age, and the level and type of alcohol people consume.Method: We use unique marketing survey data that link the media individuals consume and advertising appearing in those media. Our sample of 306,451 men and women represents the population age 18 and older living in the 48 contiguous United States between 1996 and 2009. We measure advertising exposure not with the standard expenditure data but with counts of actual advertisements people likely saw. We relate advertising exposure across groups defined by age, gender, and the amount of beer, wine, and spirits consumed.Results: We found that drinkers, particularly young male drinkers, see much more alcohol advertising. Men, especially younger men, see more advertisements for alcohol of all types than do women. Their higher exposure is largely explained by sex differences in the propensity to read sports and adult magazines and to watch sports and gambling television programs.Conclusions: The evidence highlights the need to recognize, and when possible, control for the fact that a selected group of individuals is more likely to see alcohol advertising. Firms successfully place advertising on programs and in magazines viewed by youth and drinkers. To estimate whether seeing advertising causes people to drink (more), researchers need to develop clever identification strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. To develop a smoking indicator that combines the popularity and duration of smoking and the quantity and quality of consumed cigarettes, factors that vary dramatically over time and across generations. Methods. We used retrospective reports on smoking behavior and a time series of cigarette tar yields to standardize nationally representative life-course smoking prevalence rates of 11 generations of US men and women, spanning 120 years. For each generation and gender, we related the standardized data with the corresponding rates of smoking-attributable mortality. Results. Our indicator suggests that US cigarette consumption spread, peaked, and contracted faster than commonly perceived; predicts a significantly stronger smoking- mortality correlation than unadjusted smoking prevalence; and reveals the emergence of a delay (by up to 8 years) in premature death from smoking that is consistent with increasing population access to effective treatments. In fact, we show that, among recent cohorts, smoking health-risk exposure is at a historic low and will account for less than 5% of deaths. Conclusions. Relative to unstandardized measures, our novel, standardized indicator of smoking prevalence describes a different history of smoking diffusion in the United States, and more strongly predicts later-life mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the association between adult health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top percentiles from 1913 to 2009. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to individual data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data for 1984–2009. Controlling for demographic and economic factors, we find both men and women are statistically more likely to report poorer health if income was more unequally distributed during the first years of their lives. The association is robust to alternative specifications of income inequality and time trends and remains significant even when we control for differences in overall childhood health. Our results constitute prima facie evidence that adults' health may be adversely affected by the income inequality they experienced as children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these trajectories to measure culture by cohort and cohort-age, and more accurately relative to the extant literature. Our proxy predicts smoking participation of second-generation British immigrants but not that of non-British immigrants and natives. Researchers can apply our strategy to estimate culture effects on other outcomes when retrospective or longitudinal data are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We show, with three longitudinal datasets, that cigarette taxes and prices affect smoking initiation decisions. Evidence from longitudinal studies is mixed but generally find that initiation does not vary with price or tax. We show that the lack of statistical significance partly results because of limited policy variation in the time periods studied, truncated behavioral windows, or mis-assignment of price and tax rates in retrospective data (which occurs when one has no information about respondents’ prior state or region of residence). Our findings highlight issues relevant to initiation behavior generally, particularly those for which individuals’ responses to policy changes may be noisy or small in magnitude. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

When event data are retrospectively reported, more temporally distal events tend to get 'heaped' on even multiples of reporting units. Heaping may introduce a type of attenuation bias because it causes researchers to mismatch time-varying right-hand side variables. We develop a model-based approach to estimate the extent of heaping in the data and how it affects regression parameter estimates. We use smoking cessation data as a motivating example, but our method is general. It facilitates the use of retrospective data from the multitude of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies worldwide that collect and potentially could collect event data. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although the prevalence of smoking has declined among US adults, an estimated 22.5% of the adult population (45.8 million adults) regularly smoked in 2002. Starting from this level, it will not be possible to achieve the Healthy People national health objectives of a reduction in the prevalence of smoking among adults to less than 12% by 2010 unless the rate of smoking cessation substantially rises from its current average of about 2.5%/year. To achieve that goal it is imperative that we better understand what factors are associated with successful quitting so that policies and resources can be better targeted. We describe the socioeconomic characteristics of smokers who attempt to and successfully quit and show how those characteristics differ across three methods they use in their cessation behavior. The results highlight socioeconomic differences across the methods smokers use and provide evidence that can be used to better target smoking cessation information and resources to smokers most likely to use particular methods. Better targeting is likely to lead to more quits. While it is unlikely that cessation rates can be raised by enough to achieve the reduction in national smoking prevalence that the Healthy People initiative has set, a better understanding of who chooses which method will move us closer to that goal. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The promise of empirical evidence to inform policy makers about their population's health, wealth, employment and economic well being has propelled governments to invest in the harmonization of country-specific micro-data over the last 25 years. We review the major data harmonization projects launched over this period. These projects include the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-Economic Research (CHER), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We discuss their success in providing reliable data for policy analysis and how they are being used to answer policy questions. While there have been some notable failures, on the whole these harmonization efforts have proven to be of major value to the research community and to policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Aims To investigate the reliability and validity of retrospectively reported information on smoking. Design Nationally representative retrospective data from longitudinal surveys and contemporaneous data from repeated cross-sectional surveys were used. Participants Adult respondents to three of the four samples of the National Longitudinal Surveys Original Cohort 1966–68; the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979; and various waves of the US National Health Interview Survey. Measurements Reliability was investigated by calculating kappa statistics for repeated measures of ever-smoking and annual-smoking status. Validity was investigated by comparing smoking prevalence rates generated by retrospective data with contemporaneously measured rates. Findings Kappa statistics indicated the repeated measures of ever-smoking status show substantial agreement; repeated measures of annual-smoking status show moderate agreement. Retrospective reports on smoking behavior produced prevalence rates that match reasonably well with those from contemporaneous reports of smoking behavior. Conclusions Retrospective data on smoking can be an important resource for tobacco addiction research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Validation of a Method for Reconstructing Historical Rates of Smoking Prevalence," by U. Bilal et al, in a 2014 issue.

Objectives. Our objective was to show how a woman's economic well-being changes in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Canada after her husband's death and the importance of public and private income sources in offsetting the economic consequences of that death. Methods. With data from the Cross-National Equivalent File, we used event history analysis to track changes in the social security replacement rate and the more comprehensive total income replacement rate for women and to show how these changes vary across age and household income quintiles within and across countries. Results. There were substantial differences across the countries in how income from specific sources changes, especially with respect to the mix of income from government and private sources, but the overall across-country pattern of total income replacement rates was remarkably similar both in size and in distribution across age and the woman's place in the income distribution prior to her husband's death. Discussion. Studies that focus on a social security replacement rate will seriously understate the actual total income replacement rate of women following a husband's death. This will especially be the case in countries like the United States where private sources of income play a more important role in income replacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: An extensive literature uses reconstructed historical smoking rates by birth-cohort to inform anti-smoking policies. This paper examines whether and how these rates change when one adjusts for differential mortality of smokers and non-smokers.Methods: Using retrospectively reported data from the US (Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1986, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005), the UK (British Household Panel Survey, 1999, 2002), and Russia (Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Study, 2000), we generate life-course smoking prevalence rates by age-cohort. With cause-specific death rates from secondary sources and an improved method, we correct for differential mortality, and we test whether adjusted and unadjusted rates statistically differ. With US data (National Health Interview Survey, 1967-2004), we also compare contemporaneously measured smoking prevalence rates with the equivalent rates from retrospective data.Results: We find that differential mortality matters only for men. For Russian men over age 70 and US and UK men over age 80 unadjusted smoking prevalence understates the true prevalence. The results using retrospective and contemporaneous data are similar.Conclusions: Differential mortality bias affects our understanding of smoking habits of old cohorts and, therefore, of inter-generational patterns of smoking. Unless one focuses on the young, policy recommendations based on unadjusted smoking rates may be misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]