CENTER ON THE ECONOMICS & DEMOGRAPHY OF AGING
This theme encompasses theory and empirical analysis at the intersection of psychology and economics, the Behavioral Change Research Network, and experimental economics innovations. Berkeley is a leading center of this work, with aging-focused research such as on understanding financial decision-making among the elderly, and behavioral economics interventions to improve health behaviors. Resaerchers in this sub-field also concern themselves with questions of methodology and the assumptions and expectations of the research community, and how these shape the field.
Existing studies show substantial heterogeneity in individual preferences, specifically attitudes toward risk and time. These preferences and attitudes enter nearly all realms of individual decision-making and are thus important inputs into any measure of welfare.
This project aims to study the causal connections between brain and behavior in social and interpersonal settings. Deficits in social behavior are symptoms of a striking array of neurocognitive disorders.
Some of the most important developmental milestones in a person’s life involve changes in confidence. How does this confidence change as adults mature into old age? On the one hand, we might expect that age and experience help people become better calibrated in their confidence judgments.
Given the strong and very similar pattern of how past experiences affect current expectations in two different contexts, stocks and inflation, this pilot proposes to explore the generalizability of the "experience effect." Do unemployment experiences bias unemployment expectations?
The monoamine neuromodulatory systems, in particular dopamine and serotonin, are known to be critical for decision-making processes in all vertebrate species. In humans, however, there has been little evidence directly linking monoamine turnover rates and behavioral measures.
The proposed research is a theoretical and empirical project joint with Dan Benjamin at Cornell relating to psychological biases and the interpretation of some existing research on health, longevity, and political beliefs, and to develop methods for improving these elicitations.
CEDA Pilot Report
Using Group Commitment To Promote Smoking Cessation in Thailand
By William H. Dow and Justin White
The first aim of the project is to generate and analyze new experimental data for understanding preferences with a much larger and much more diverse pools of subjects than the usual collection of university students.
The proposed research would implement and experimental "audit" study of differences in the call back rates for job applications for older workers, by time unemployed. The experiment would send matched pairs of applications, from workers 50 and older, to posted job openings.
This project uses Social Security Administration (SSA) data on individuals’ day of birth, and earnings to examine how the size of Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) benefits affects individuals’ earnings.
We proposed to examine an important and understudied aspect of experimental research: how the experimental findings relate to the priors of the research community. We proposed to undertake a pilot study of the feasibility of recording forecasts of experts for experimental studies, with the purpose of measuring the beliefs of the research community before a study results are released, as well as how these beliefs are updated with the study at hand.