Douglas A Wolf
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 178098 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Douglas A Wolf |
| PRENOMES | Douglas A |
| SOBRENOME | Wolf |
| ASSINATURA | WOLF D A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4203-8993 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 559 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1982 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Policy Brief
Stability and Volatility in the Contextual Predictors of Working-Age Mortality in the United States
The contextual predictors of mortality in the United States are well documented, but the COVID-19 pandemic may have upended those associations. Informed by the social history of disease framework (SHDF), this study examined how the importance of county contexts on adult deaths from all causes, drug poisonings, and COVID-19-related causes fluctuated during the pandemic. Using 2018 to 2021 vital statistics data, for each quarter, we estimated assoc…
State Covid-19 Policies and Drug Overdose Mortality Among Working-Age Adults in the United States, 2020
Objectives. To identify relationships between US states’ COVID-19 in-person activity limitation and economic support policies and drug overdose deaths among working-age adults in 2020. Methods. We used county-level data on 140 435 drug overdoses among adults aged 25 to 64 years during January 2019 to December 2020 from the National Vital Statistics System and data on states’ COVID-19 policies from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker t…
Social isolation and subclinical vascular pathways to cerebrovascular disease
Social isolation and lack of social support are risk factors for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease (CVD). This study explored the relationship between measures of social support and subclinical measures of CVD risk. 58 healthy adults ages 18 to 85 years participated in this study. The Berkman-Syme Social Network Inventory (SNI) was used to assess social isolation, with higher scores signifying less isolation. Social support was defined u…
State policies that promote, and that inhibit, improved public health
The United States has no national requirement that employers provide paid sick leave (PSL) to their employees, despite the many established public health benefits of PSL access. Many states, and some localities, have passed laws requiring PSL within their jurisdictions. Past studies have shown that these PSL mandates are effective in promoting increased PSL access. However, past studies have not considered two other commonly-used state policy ini…
Division of Parent Care Among Adult Children
This study underscores the importance of using the family systems perspective to better understand adult children's caregiving behavior. Although just one adult child providing care is the most common caregiving arrangement initially, adult children tend to work with their siblings to support parents' aging in place as parents' need for care increases
Business Cycles, Medicaid Generosity, and Birth Outcomes
Uses of Panel Study of Income Dynamics Data in Research on Aging
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has, over its 50-year history, proven to be a useful source of data for research on virtually all the major topics in the area of social gerontology. This usefulness reflects three of the leading features of the PSID: its longitudinality; its content; and its tracking rules, which permit users to develop family-based and generationally linked measures. This article summarizes key areas of survey content, …
Does Paid Family Leave Reduce Nursing Home Use? The California Experience
The intent of Paid Family Leave (PFL) is to make it financially easier for individuals to take time off from paid work to care for children and seriously ill family members. Given the linkages between care provided by family members and the usage of paid services, we examine whether California's PFL program influenced nursing home utilization in California during the 1999 to 2008 period. This is the first empirical study to examine the effects of…
Do U.S. states' socioeconomic and policy contexts shape adult disability
Disability-Free Life Expectancy Over 30 Years
Objectives. To examine changes in active life expectancy in the United States over 30 years for older men and women (aged ≥ 65 years). Methods. We used the 1982 and 2004 National Long Term Care Survey and the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study to estimate age-specific mortality and disability rates, the overall chances of survival and of surviving without disability, and years of active life for men and women. Results. For older men, lon…
Disability Trajectories at the End of Life
The model reveals a complex pattern of age- and time-dependent heterogeneity in late-life disablement. The techniques developed here could be applied to other phenomena known to depend on TTD, such as cognitive change, weight loss, and health care spending
Getting Help From Others
Findings on the total number of helpers and total hours of care have implications for the division of care labor within families and between families and nonfamily members. Foreseeable trends in the demand for and the supply of help suggest further evolution in patterns of elders' receipt of help with care needs. Even if those with needs for care continue to have their needs addressed by one or more helpers, the number of helpers, and the aggrega…
Behavioral Adaptation and Late-Life Disability
Objectives. To inform public health efforts to promote independent functioning among older adults, we have provided new national estimates of late-life disability that explicitly recognize behavioral adaptations. Methods. We analyzed the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study, a study of Medicare enrollees aged 65 years and older (n = 8077). For 7 mobility and self-care activities we identified 5 hierarchical stages—fully able, successful ac…
Is There a Trade-off Between Parent Care and Self-care
Caregiving for family members is often described as a 36-hour day. Previous literature has suggested that family caregivers have little time to attend to their own health needs, such as participating in leisure-time physical activity. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we analyze whether time-allocation decisions reflect a conflict between time devoted to informal care and time devoted to self-health promotion through physical activ…
The Intergenerational Welfare State
Demography is a realm of private decisions with public effects. In both highand low-fertility regimes, families make decisions that significantly influence the well-being of others. Excessively rapid population growth can threaten economic and ecological viability. Population decline can threaten cultural continuity and fiscal sustainability. As Paul Demeny has warned us, there is no invisible hand in the family that serves to align private and p…
Family structure and the reproduction of inequality
Fertility history, health, and health changes in later life
We investigated associations between later-life health and fertility history for women and men, using the British Household Panel Survey. We modelled health and its rate of change jointly with sample retention over an 11-year period. For women, childlessness is associated with limitation of activity for health reasons and faster acquisition of the limitation. High parity (four or more children) is associated with poorer health for both women and …
Fiscal Externalities of Becoming a Parent
Theoretical and empirical results suggest that there are externalities to childbearing, but those results usually assume that these externalities accrue uniformly within a homogeneous population. We advance this argument by developing separate estimates of the fiscal externalities associated with parents-those who devote time or material resources to minor children-and nonparents. Our analysis uses data from the US Panel Study of income Dynamics …
Demographic Change and Its Public Sector Consequences
It is widely believed that projected changes in the age structure of the U.S. population will create serious fiscal pressures at the federal level. Irrespective of any reforms undertaken at the federal level, these demographic trends also will have a direct impact on the way state and local governments operate. A review of recent population projections to 2020 reveals a great deal of heterogeneity in demographic trends at lower levels of governme…
Modeling transition rates using panel current-status data
Studies of disability dynamics and active life expectancy often rely on transition rates or probabilities that are estimated using panel survey data in which respondents report on current health or functional status. If respondents are contacted at intervals of one or two years, then relatively short periods of disability or recovery between surveys may be missed. Much published research that uses such data assumes that there are no unrecorded tr…
When Child Care Breaks Down
Qualitative research suggests that day-to-day problems with child care produce significant costs for low-income mothers. But the relevance of daily child care problems for mothers of all socioeconomic backgrounds has been largely overlooked. This article asks two interrelated questions: What factors shape how often mothers experience child care disruptions? and What factors shape how often care disruptions lead mothers to miss work? Using the Fra…
Trends in Rates of Onset of and Recovery From Disability at Older Ages
Our findings are consistent with declining population-level disability prevalence only if any downward trend in onset outweighs the downward trend in recovery. These findings are also consistent with a trend toward more severe disability problems among the disabled population
Parent Care and the Stress Process
This study distinguishes the outcomes of parental care needs from those attributable to caregiving activities. Adverse psychological outcomes appear to be dispersed throughout the family. To focus narrowly on active caregivers is to underestimate the social burdens of disability at older ages
Family support for older people in an era of demographic change and policy constraints
This paper introduces the Special Issue of four empirical studies on the provision of family support to older people that have been written members of the Family Support for Older People: Determinants and Consequences (FAMSUP) network. They have in common the use of individual-level data and recognition of the importance of demographic forces, cultural variations and public policy in shaping patterns of elder care. The four papers are also explic…
Selection of Children To Provide Care
We use the first wave of data from the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) study to examine the effects of past parent-to-child financial transfers on selection of a child to provide assistance with basic personal care for unmarried parents. We estimate a fixed-effects conditional logit model and find a positive and significant association between past financial transfers and a child's current helping behavior. The coefficient …
Household composition choices of older unmarried women
This article extends previous research on the household composition of older unmarried women, using a statistical model that treats each of a woman’s surviving children as a distinct potential provider of a shared household. Additional possibilities— living alone, living with other nuclear-family relatives, and living with others— are also recognized, providing a varied range of household-structure opportunities for older women. The approach allo…
The Division of Family Labor
We consider the division of caregiving efforts among the children of older, functionally limited parents. Our model of parental care assumes that care decisions are made in the context of an extended family, with each child taking into account not only the parent's needs and the child's own circumstances, but also the characteristics and actual care behavior of siblings. We propose a simultaneous-Tobit statistical framework that embodies these as…
Time? money? both? the allocation of resources to older Parents
We provide estimates of a reduced-form model of the allocation of household time and money resources. We consider four demands for these resources: time spent working, time spent providing care for noncoresident elderly parents, time spent performing house-work, and monetary transfers to noncoresident elderly parents. We focus on the effects of wage rates and parental characteristics on the allocation decisions of adult children and their househo…
Do U.S. states' socioeconomic and policy contexts shape adult disability
Fertility history, health, and health changes in later life
We investigated associations between later-life health and fertility history for women and men, using the British Household Panel Survey. We modelled health and its rate of change jointly with sample retention over an 11-year period. For women, childlessness is associated with limitation of activity for health reasons and faster acquisition of the limitation. High parity (four or more children) is associated with poorer health for both women and …
New Methods for Analyzing Active Life Expectancy
The increment-decrement life-table methods used in several recent analyses of active life expectancy depend on parameters representing rates of movement between functional states such as "active" or "disabled." Available data often pose severe problems for the derivation of these parameters. For example, panel-survey data typically fail to record functional status between interviews. The time intervals between interviews also tend to vary across …
Parental Housing Assistance and Parent-Child Proximity in Italy
Many studies of intergenerational exchanges include parent-child proximity as an exogenous explanatory variable. Proximity may itself be a consequence of intergenerational resource flows, however. We analyze patterns of economic transfers between generations and their relationship to parent-child proximity in Italy. Parental support for a child's home purchase may influence the child's choice of location, whether to facilitate parent-child contac…
Child care subsidies and the employment of welfare recipients
Changing patterns of maternal employment, coupled with stronger work requirements for welfare recipients, are increasing the demand for child care. For many families, the cost of child care creates a financial burden; for mothers with low incomes and those who are former welfare recipients, these costs may be an insurmountable barrier to employment or economic self-sufficiency. Despite increased public spending in this area, the receipt of any ch…
Parent Care and the Stress Process
This study distinguishes the outcomes of parental care needs from those attributable to caregiving activities. Adverse psychological outcomes appear to be dispersed throughout the family. To focus narrowly on active caregivers is to underestimate the social burdens of disability at older ages
When Child Care Breaks Down
Qualitative research suggests that day-to-day problems with child care produce significant costs for low-income mothers. But the relevance of daily child care problems for mothers of all socioeconomic backgrounds has been largely overlooked. This article asks two interrelated questions: What factors shape how often mothers experience child care disruptions? and What factors shape how often care disruptions lead mothers to miss work? Using the Fra…
Family structure and the reproduction of inequality
Modeling transition rates using panel current-status data
Studies of disability dynamics and active life expectancy often rely on transition rates or probabilities that are estimated using panel survey data in which respondents report on current health or functional status. If respondents are contacted at intervals of one or two years, then relatively short periods of disability or recovery between surveys may be missed. Much published research that uses such data assumes that there are no unrecorded tr…
Kin availability and the living arrangements of older women
Place Characteristics and Residential Location Choice Among the Retirement-Age Population
Although income tax reductions might influence the location decisions of recent retirees, whether or not the economic benefits associated with these population gains outweigh the accompanying revenue losses is an important area for further research. A more cost-effective strategy may be for states to focus on marketing their amenities rather than using fiscal policy to recruit retirees
Disability-Free Life Expectancy Over 30 Years
Objectives. To examine changes in active life expectancy in the United States over 30 years for older men and women (aged ≥ 65 years). Methods. We used the 1982 and 2004 National Long Term Care Survey and the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study to estimate age-specific mortality and disability rates, the overall chances of survival and of surviving without disability, and years of active life for men and women. Results. For older men, lon…
Fiscal Externalities of Becoming a Parent
Theoretical and empirical results suggest that there are externalities to childbearing, but those results usually assume that these externalities accrue uniformly within a homogeneous population. We advance this argument by developing separate estimates of the fiscal externalities associated with parents-those who devote time or material resources to minor children-and nonparents. Our analysis uses data from the US Panel Study of income Dynamics …
Division of Parent Care Among Adult Children
This study underscores the importance of using the family systems perspective to better understand adult children's caregiving behavior. Although just one adult child providing care is the most common caregiving arrangement initially, adult children tend to work with their siblings to support parents' aging in place as parents' need for care increases
Retire to where? A discrete choice model of residential location
Many studies of migration attempt to identify attributes of places that influence residential location decisions. Most such studies relate an area's migration rates to its own attributes, or the flow of migrants between two areas to the attributes of both places. We focus on retirement migration within the US, and extend the literature by using a discrete choice framework in which a person's location decision depends on the attributes of all pote…
Trends in Rates of Onset of and Recovery From Disability at Older Ages
Our findings are consistent with declining population-level disability prevalence only if any downward trend in onset outweighs the downward trend in recovery. These findings are also consistent with a trend toward more severe disability problems among the disabled population
Correlations between frequencies of kin
Recent years have seen the development of formal and microsimulation models of the structure and dynamics of kin networks. These models generally assume uncorrelated fertility within and across generations. Several sets of real data, however, show positive correlations between the frequencies of various categories of kin. This paper uses formal models to calculate the correlations that will exist between certain categories of kin even if mothers …
Disability Trajectories at the End of Life
The model reveals a complex pattern of age- and time-dependent heterogeneity in late-life disablement. The techniques developed here could be applied to other phenomena known to depend on TTD, such as cognitive change, weight loss, and health care spending
Reconsidering Substitution in Long-Term Care
These models raise the possibility that reductions of informal care hours may be accomplished with a combination of formal care and assistive devices, rather than from either alternative alone
Shrinking Kin Networks in Italy Due to Sustained Low Fertility
A Case Study on the Use of Multiple Imputation
Multiple imputation is a relatively new technique for dealing with missing values on items from survey data. Rather than deleting observations for which a value is missing, or assigning a single value to incomplete observations, one replaces each missing item with two or more values. Inferences then can be made with the complete data set. This paper presents an application of multiple imputation using the 1987–1988 National Survey of Families and…
The economic consequences of experiencing parental marital disruptions
A Spatial Analysis of the Public Sector
Kin availability and the living arrangements of older women
Simulation Methods for Analyzing Continuous-Time Event-History Models
This research was supported in part by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development contract NO1-HD-02849. Any opinions expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Urban Institute or any of its sponsors. I have benefited from conversations with Thomas Espenshade, Charles Calhoun, and Ralph Ginsberg and from comments on earlier drafts by Christopher Winship, Nancy Tuma, and two an…
The Duration of Welfare Spells
Probability distributions for the duration of welfare spells are estimated. The principle guiding the work is that a recipient will not exit from welfare if the expected utility on welfare exceeds the expected utility of welfare. The analysis indicates that while the majority of welfare spells are of short duration, a nontrivial minority of spells are quite long. Those recipients with long spells are found to differ in predictable ways from those…
The Effect of the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act on Welfare Recipients and Work Incentives
The 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) altered the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in important ways, especially regarding the work incentives in the benefit formula. We use a set of data on AFDC recipients active just prior to OBRA to determine how recipients were affected by the legislation. We find that working recipients were very hard hit and that the "tax rate" implicit in the program rose to 78 percent. Th…
Kinship patterns and household composition
Household composition choices of older unmarried women
This article extends previous research on the household composition of older unmarried women, using a statistical model that treats each of a woman’s surviving children as a distinct potential provider of a shared household. Additional possibilities— living alone, living with other nuclear-family relatives, and living with others— are also recognized, providing a varied range of household-structure opportunities for older women. The approach allo…
Later Phases of the Family Cycle
Correlations between frequencies of kin
Recent years have seen the development of formal and microsimulation models of the structure and dynamics of kin networks. These models generally assume uncorrelated fertility within and across generations. Several sets of real data, however, show positive correlations between the frequencies of various categories of kin. This paper uses formal models to calculate the correlations that will exist between certain categories of kin even if mothers …
Satisfaction with Child Care
Approximately 11% of U.S. children have mothers on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). In 1988 this program was reformed to require mothers with children over the age of 2 years to participate in employment programs, and child care subsidies were guaranteed. This paper examines AFDC mothers' perspectives on their child care in 1983–1984, before welfare reform, to explore the characteristics of care that mothers are likely to seek. Mot…
Child-Care Use Among Welfare Mothers
The current welfare policy environment places considerable emphasis on employment as a means for reducing welfare dependency. Policy provisions that subsidize child-care use are aimed at encouraging work, exit from welfare, and sustained independence from public support. Yet there has been very little research on the child-care usage patterns of welfare mothers, particularly with respect to factors associated with the persistence of such patterns…
Married Women's Allocation of Time to Employment and Care of Elderly Parents
Douglas A. Wolf, Beth J. Soldo, Married Women's Allocation of Time to Employment and Care of Elderly Parents, The Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 29, No. 4, Special Issue: The Family and Intergenerational Relations (Autumn, 1994), pp. 1259-1276
A Case Study on the Use of Multiple Imputation
Multiple imputation is a relatively new technique for dealing with missing values on items from survey data. Rather than deleting observations for which a value is missing, or assigning a single value to incomplete observations, one replaces each missing item with two or more values. Inferences then can be made with the complete data set. This paper presents an application of multiple imputation using the 1987–1988 National Survey of Families and…
From Parent to Child
How do parents allocate human capital among their children? To what extent do parental decisions about resource allocation determine children's eventual economic success? The analyses in this text explore these questions by developing and testing a model in which the earnings of children with different genetic endowments respond differently to investments in human capital. Behrman, Pollak and Taubman use this model to investigate issues such as: …
The Division of Family Labor
We consider the division of caregiving efforts among the children of older, functionally limited parents. Our model of parental care assumes that care decisions are made in the context of an extended family, with each child taking into account not only the parent's needs and the child's own circumstances, but also the characteristics and actual care behavior of siblings. We propose a simultaneous-Tobit statistical framework that embodies these as…
Selection of Children To Provide Care
We use the first wave of data from the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) study to examine the effects of past parent-to-child financial transfers on selection of a child to provide assistance with basic personal care for unmarried parents. We estimate a fixed-effects conditional logit model and find a positive and significant association between past financial transfers and a child's current helping behavior. The coefficient …
New Methods for Analyzing Active Life Expectancy
The increment-decrement life-table methods used in several recent analyses of active life expectancy depend on parameters representing rates of movement between functional states such as "active" or "disabled." Available data often pose severe problems for the derivation of these parameters. For example, panel-survey data typically fail to record functional status between interviews. The time intervals between interviews also tend to vary across …
The Family as Provider of Long-Term Care
The passage of the baby-boom generation into old age raises the prospect of intense pressures on public programs benefiting the elderly, limiting any contemplated expansion of programs serving those needing sustained personal care. This necessitates consideration of comparative efficiency of alternative resources for elder care. I focus on two distinct aspects of such efficiency: productive--the relationship between inputs and outputs--and target…
Time? money? both? the allocation of resources to older Parents
We provide estimates of a reduced-form model of the allocation of household time and money resources. We consider four demands for these resources: time spent working, time spent providing care for noncoresident elderly parents, time spent performing house-work, and monetary transfers to noncoresident elderly parents. We focus on the effects of wage rates and parental characteristics on the allocation decisions of adult children and their househo…
Nursing home entry in Germany and the United States
Shrinking Kin Networks in Italy Due to Sustained Low Fertility
Retire to where? A discrete choice model of residential location
Many studies of migration attempt to identify attributes of places that influence residential location decisions. Most such studies relate an area's migration rates to its own attributes, or the flow of migrants between two areas to the attributes of both places. We focus on retirement migration within the US, and extend the literature by using a discrete choice framework in which a person's location decision depends on the attributes of all pote…
Child Care Subsidies and the Employment of Welfare Recipients
Changing patterns of maternal employment, coupled with stronger work requirements for welfare recipients, are increasing the demand for child care. For many families, the cost of child care creates a financial burden; for mothers with low incomes and those who are former welfare recipients, these costs may be an insurmountable barrier to employment or economic self-sufficiency. Despite increased public spending in this area, the receipt of any ch…
Patterns of Active Life Among Older Women
This study examines the distribution of total, unimpaired, and impaired life for several groups of older women defined by race, education, and marital history. Using data from the 1984-1990 Longitudinal Study of Aging, we model transitions among functional statuses using discrete-time Markov chains, and use microsimulation to produce summary indices of active life. Remaining years of life and the proportion of remaining years with disability vary…
Medicine (33 obras) · Economics (32 obras) · Demography (27 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Psychology (25 obras) · Demographic economics (22 obras) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (21 obras) · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving (21 obras) · Gerontology (18 obras) · Population (18 obras)