Studies show that cognitive abilities tend to decline postretirement, and that continuation of work or work-like activity can slow cognitive decline. What is less well understood, however, is exactly which activities are most conducive to maintaining cognitive productivity. This grant funds efforts by Ursula Staudinger, director of the Columbia University Center on Aging, to understand whether and to what degree activities that involve novel information processing play a role in arresting cognitive decline.   Combining aspects of three well-respected longitudinal studies, the Health and Retirement Study, the Midlife in America Study, and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, Staudinger and her team will catalog the work and leisure activities of respondents and characterize the ways in which these activities involve the processing of new information. Comparing these activities with health data on cognitive decline will then permit an estimation of the role novel processing plays in sustaining mental productivity. The resulting research promises to provide important new evidence that will help us better understand how to optimize cognitive aging and identify the individuals or groups whose activity patterns place them at particular risk for cognitive decline.

This grant funds research by UCLA economist Kathleen McGarry that examines how providing eldercare affects the labor market activities of adult sons and daughters. Using descriptive analyses, multivariate regressions, and structural modeling on data drawn from the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study, McGarry and her team will study changes in employment, hours worked, wages, and benefits (including health insurance and pension wealth) of adult caregivers in order to assess how caregiving activities affect financial well-being in later life. They will also draw comparisons across genders between the types of care, the number of hours of care, and the effect on labor market behaviors. Of particular interest is whether having a parent in need increases the labor market attachment of men while decreasing the labor force attachment of women. The experimental sample will have over 3,000 couples in which both spouses have living parents, allowing the UCLA team to investigate the transfer of resources to a husband’s parents compared to a wife’s parents. Preliminary analyses for the provision of parental assistance by married couples suggests that greater financial transfers flow to the husband’s parents and greater time transfers to the wife’s parents. There are several potential explanations for this pattern—including differences in the opportunity cost of time for the husband and wife, household bargaining models, and preference for providing care to a parent of the same gender as the adult child. Additional modeling work will allow the team to simulate the effects of various policy measures on caregiving and labor market outcomes, including public financial support for caregivers and low-cost long-term care insurance. The work promises to increase our understanding of the economics of marriage and the family and its implications for the older work force.

The Age Boom Academy at the Columbia Aging Center is a well-respected forum for learning about up-to-date scholarly research regarding the economic, social, and health issues raised by increased longevity. This grant provides three years of support to the Academy to house and develop a platform for improving journalistic understanding of the aging of the U.S. work force. With Sloan support, the Academy will hold a yearly workshop that brings journalists together with leading researchers to discuss the best current scientific thinking about issues related to aging and work. Issues to be addressed include reimagining work and retirement transitions; health expectancy, life expectancy, and work trajectories; and aging and human capital investment. At least 60 journalists are expected to attend the yearly academies, where they will be able to ask questions, develop relationships with scientists in the field, and learn about new and groundbreaking research. The result will be a press corps more empowered to cover issues related to the aging work force.

This grant provides two years of funding for a series of initiatives by SSFILM to support and nurture films and filmmakers that tackle scientific or technological themes or feature scientists, mathematicians, or engineers as major characters. Three distinct but interrelated activities are supported. The first is a filmmaker fund for screenwriters working on science and technology films, with one winning screenwriter the first year and two in the second. Each filmmaker will receive a $35,000 grant and a two-month residency at the Film House, SSFILMS’s newly built artist residency facility. In addition to residency, supported screenwriters will have their work presented in staged readings both at the Festival and at other events around the country. Second, SSFILM will host an annual film prize for the best science- or technology-themed film submitted. Selected by an independent panel of filmmakers and scientists, the winning film will be announced in December at a high-profile screening event aimed at attracting critical notice. Third, SFFILMwill partner with The Black List, an influential annual industry survey of the best unproduced screenplays, to send a Sloan-supported screenwriter to its coveted annual screenwriting workshop. The collection of activities represents an exciting new partnership for the Sloan Film Festival program, which builds bridges between the film industry and Silicon Valley’s active and energetic science and technology culture.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) represents the largest reform to the U.S. health care system since the 1965 introduction of Medicare and Medicaid. Questions arise as to the possible effects of this significant health care change on the labor market behavior of near-elderly workers (workers aged 59 to 64, who are not yet eligible for Medicare). This grant supports a study by Mark Duggan and his colleague Gopi Shah Goda that examines the likely effects of the ACA on labor outcomes for these near elderly. Duggan and Goda will address several questions about the ACA, including how the ACA affects the employment, labor force participation, self-employment, wages, hours of work, and related labor market outcomes of older workers; which provisions of the ACA contribute to the estimated effects; and how these effects vary over time and by gender, race, ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, and health.

This grant provides continued support for a program at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama (CMU) that exposes top dramatic writing students to science and technology and awards prizes to student screenwriters who write science- or technology-themed scripts. The CMU program includes a fall symposium that brings scientists to the drama school to introduce students to recent developments in a variety of scientific disciplines; a year-long screenwriting workshop that meets weekly and focuses on the challenges and opportunities posed by incorporating science into dramatic or comedic narratives, a mentorship program that pairs film students with working scientists to help them depict science accurately in their work, an annual screenwriting competition that awards $17,500 to the two best science-themed scripts submitted, and yearly showcases in Los Angeles and New York that bring student filmmakers into contact with leading producers, directors, and distributors in the film and television industry. Grant funds provide core support for these activities for another two years.

Funds from this grant provide three years of support to the Boston College Center on Aging & Work for the operation and expansion of a multidisciplinary research network that links together scholars working on issues related to the aging work force. To date, nearly 90 scholars from 15 disciplines across 14 countries have joined the network, sharing the latest news, research results, data, and ideas for further scholarship. Grant funds will support expansion of the network’s membership to 150 members globally, a survey to track member priorities, the launch of a summer research institute in 2016, a one-day member conference to be held at the annual meeting of the 2017 Gerontological Society of America, and the development of a long-term sustainability plan for the network.

The grant provides two years of continued support for a partnership with the Tribeca Film Institute in its continuing efforts to highlight excellent high-quality narrative films with scientific and technological themes. The TFI/Sloan Filmmaker Fund supports science-themed film projects in a wide variety of ways, giving grants of between $15,000 and $25,000 for screenplay development, optioning of literary material for adaption, and preproduction expenses like casting or location scouting. Additional postproduction grants are also available for science-themed projects, including funds for sound editing, negative cutting, and printmaking.  In addition to grants to offset pre- and postproduction expenses, supported filmmakers receive help from scientific and industry advisors, to shepherd the project through production, and are mentored by TFI’s insiders. In addition to the TFI Filmmaker Fund, TFI hosts several science-themed events at the annual Tribeca Film Festival, including a staged reading of screenplays by supported artists, a retrospective screening of a classic science-themed movie and panel discussion of the film by scientists and industry professionals, and an industry reception that brings supported filmmakers together with leading Hollywood executives and distributors.

Funds from this grant provide two years of continued support for the Sundance Institute to promote the production and distribution of high-quality narrative films with scientific or technological themes or characters. The Institute’s efforts, which are primarily centered around the influential Sundance Film Festival, include five separate components: A commissioning fellowship of $25,000 to the screenwriter of a promising early-stage film project to be used to help usher the script toward production. An episodic story fellowship of $10,000 to the scriptwriter of a promising early-stage television project to be used to help usher the project toward completion. A lab fellowship, which allows the director of a science-themed film project to participate in the Sundance Film Festival’s prestigious production lab for up and coming filmmakers. A feature film prize, awarded annually at the Sundance Film Festival for the best science or technology themed film submitted to the festival. A Science-in-Film forum held annually at the Sundance Film Festival that brings independent filmmakers together with working scientists in a moderated panel discussion about the opportunities and challenges posed by incorporating scientific and technological themes into narrative storytelling. Fellowships include year-long support from the Sundance Institute, as well as dedicated stipends to enable filmmakers to hire scientific advisors for their projects.

A number of economic studies have found that workers with access to private retiree health insurance are much more likely to retire than are their counterparts without such access who must rely entirely on Medicare. This grant to the Urban Institute supports a project that looks at the relationship between health insurance and decisions to extend work lives or to retire. Drawing on data from physician and household surveys, this project will address a number of important issues, including recent trends in physicians’ acceptance of Medicare patients, how Medicare beneficiaries’ access to care differs from those with private insurance, how these differences correlate with various factors like physician specialty, and whether these differences affect retirement decisions. Findings will shed important new light on the relative attractiveness of Medicare relative to private health insurance and the extent to which that comparison affects the exit of older workers from the labor market.