About the P01 Project

Aging citizens are required to make complex financial, health and long-term decisions as they prepare for and then enjoy increasingly long periods of retirement. Moreover, as people age, there is a mismatch between the complexity of the decisions they face and the sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual cognitive declines that accompany aging. This project will develop new data that combines objective measures of behaviors and outcomes relating to wealth and portfolio choice, subjective measures of expectations, preferences, affect, measures of financial knowledge, and measures of cognition. By combining measurements across these domains, the project will develop a fuller understanding of the financial decisionmaking and behavior of older Americans.

The project will also advance the methodology for studying the behavior and decisionmaking of older Americans by combining data from several modes: large-scale surveys conducted by mail, Internet, and telephone; laboratory experiments; cognitive interviewing; administrative records. Linking data for individual observations across these measurements modes will provide the fullest possible picture of the decisionmaking and behavior, as well as enabling assessment and improvement of the methods of measurement. The methods advanced by the project for studying older Americans' financial decisionmaking will be extended to their healthcare decisionmaking.

This research is supported by National Institute on Aging Program Project grant P01-AG026571.