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RAND Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation

Who Will be Available to Support the Elderly?
Welfare-State Policy, Fertility, and Population Age Structure

Specific Aims

The ultimate goals of the proposed research are to improve the prediction of future age structures through improved projection of fertility, and to provide information on how welfare-state policies may influence population aging through changes in family and childbearing behaviors. In this pilot project (assuming a two-year scope), we have two specific aims:

1. Identify how welfare-state policies are associated with family and childbearing behaviors, and estimate the causal effects of welfare-state policies on family and childbearing behaviors using the Fertility and Family Survey (FFS) data on selected countries.
2. Develop a methodology to project the sizes of future birth cohorts using estimates about women's family and fertility behaviors, combined with known population parameters, and estimate parameters of women's family and fertility behaviors using the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) to assess the performance of the new methodology by comparing these projected birth cohort sizes with vital statistics.

These specific aims will help us develop grant proposals to more thoroughly examine the links between welfare-state policies and family and childbearing behaviors with implications for population aging, and develop policy tools to gauge the possible impacts of various welfare-state policy options and family changes that will determine who will be available to support the elderly through changes in population age structure.