Center for Health and Wellbeing

The Center for Health and Wellbeing, together with the Research Program in Development Studies (RPDS), maintains a data archive. The archive contains data sets and documentation generated from studies conducted by CHW and RPDS researchers. Most of the files are accessible only by Princeton University researchers (faculty and students). The archive includes details on access for each data set. Data archive website.

The Center for Health and Wellbeing is home to a Demography of Aging Center, funded by the National Institute of Aging. The Demography of Aging Center, started in 2004, fosters new research on the interrelationships between socioeconomic status and health as people age; examines the determinants of decision-making and wellbeing among the elderly; and explores the determinants and policy consequences of increased longevity and population aging across and within countries over time. An area of special emphasis is research on how HIV/AIDS is affecting the health and living conditions of the elderly. The key CHW faculty associates working on this project are Anne Case, Jonathan Cohen, Angus Deaton, Noreen Goldman, and Daniel Kahneman. The center is directed by Anne Case.

The Center for Health and Wellbeing is home to a National Institute of Aging Roybal Center, called the Center for Research on Experience and Well Being (CREW). The research is being led by Angus Deaton, together with Daniel Kahneman, former CHW visiting fellow David Schkade (University of California, San Diego), Norbert Schwarz (University of Michigan) and Arthur Stone (Stony Brook University). The overall objectives of CREW are to (1) develop new methods for the measurement of well-being and health and (2) use these measures to better understand and document the experience of aging. The measures developed will be used to analyze how different life circumstances and situations contribute to the overall quality of life across the life cycle. The combination of measurements of the affective experience of situations and activities with measurements of the time spent by the population in these activities, currently collected by the Department of Labor Statistics, will contribute to the development of an experimental system of National Well-being Accounts.

The Future of Children is a journal that seeks to promote effective policies and programs for children by providing policymakers, service providers, and the media with timely, objective information based on the best available research. The journal is a collaborative effort between the Woodrow Wilson School and The Brookings Institution. The journal draws on the expertise of three Woodrow Wilson School research centers, including the Center for Health and Wellbeing. Sara McLanahan, director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, is editor-in-chief; senior editors include Christina Paxson, director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing (CHW), and Cecilia Rouse, director of the Education Research Section (ERS). Isabel Sawhill, vice president and director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, and Brookings senior fellow Ron Haskins fill out the journal's permanent editorial staff. Elisabeth Donahue, a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School, is the associate editor of The Future of Children. The journal is published twice a year. Each issue serves as a basis for a graduate course offered at the Woodrow Wilson School. Future of Children website.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, together with Alicia Menendez from the Harris School at the University of Chicago, are conducting integrated health and economic surveys in South Africa, to investigate the links between health status and economic status. This work is being done in collaboration with researchers from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and the University of Witwatersrand, and with WWS graduate and CHW visitor Ingrid le Roux of the Philani Nutrition Centers and Department of Health. The survey instruments collect data on a range of traditional and non-traditional measures of well-being, including income and consumption, measures of health status (including mental health), morbidity, crime, social connectedness, intrahousehold relationships, and direct hedonic measures of well-being. The surveys draw on recent work in economics, health, psychology, and anthropology to explore different kinds of welfare measures and the relationships between them. Their work in two South African field sites, Agincourt and Khayelitsha, is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health. Project website.

Christina Paxson is engaged in research on the relationships between economic factors and child neglect. This work is being done in collaboration with Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Neil Guterman and Jane Waldfogel (at Columbia University) and former CHW-research fellow Lawrence Berger (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The research examines how parental resources—in the form of parental presence or absence, time, and money—influence both physical and emotional neglect of pre-school children, and how recent changes in welfare policies influence neglect. The study is collecting data on child neglect as part of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort study directed by Sara McLahanan. The research is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development.

Angus Deaton, together with collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo at MIT, Jishnu Das at the World Bank, and Seva Mandir in Udaipur, is investigating health and economic status among rural households in the Udaipur district of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Members of around 1,000 households in 100 villages were surveyed, and asked about their economic activities, physical and mental health status, and experiences with healthcare. Complementary surveys collected information about village infrastructure and about the clinics and medical personnel that people use, including traditional healers. One aim of the study is to discover more about the quality of healthcare, how well it serves the people who use it, and the extent to which it contributes to health status. More broadly, the study aims to improve our understanding of the determinants of health, as well as the relationships between health and economic status, and how they work together to determine wellbeing. Project website.

Christina Paxson, together with Cecilia Rouse and Adriana Lleras-Muney, is studying the impact of education on health outcomes and behaviors among young adults. This work is being done in collaboration with the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC). The study has added a health component to an assessment of a new and unique education intervention, the Opening Doors experiment. Opening Doors will provide 4,400 economically disadvantaged young adults in a set of community colleges across the country with financial assistance, mentoring and curricular enhancements, all aimed at increasing levels of educational attainment. Approximately 3,600 controls will not receive program benefits but will be followed over time. Randomization of individuals into treatment and control groups will make it possible to identify the causal effects of educational attainment on health outcomes and behaviors. The study will assess how the intervention affects health and health behaviors in the short run; how initial health affects progression through college; and whether the intervention ameliorates adverse effects of initial health on educational attainment. This project is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

This project studies the mechanisms through which the Orphan Drug Act (ODA) benefits health and affects firm investment decisions. The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) was passed in 1983 to encourage R&D into drugs that treat rare diseases by providing incentives for R&D into rare disease drugs. Most significantly, it provides the sponsor of an orphan drug with marketing exclusivity, and a tax credit on its clinical trials expenses. Using a novel data set Wesley Yin has collected on clinical trials of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, he is estimating the impact of the ODA on clinical trials for rare disease drugs, and on final marketed products. To quantify these separate mechanisms, he distinguishes between new drug development and marketing of existing products for orphan indications. R&D for new products leads to new drug innovations for patient consumption. Clinical trials for existing products benefits patients through information of new therapeutic uses, through tailoring dosages appropriate for the orphan population, and through expansion of insurance coverage for previously off-label drug use. The ODA's impact on each of these pathways will be separately estimated. Finally, Wesley Yin is studying the mechanism through which the incentives of the ODA affect firm investments. Stylized facts suggest that the incentives are not working through standard price and revenue mechanisms. Firm structure and financing constraints may be interacting with the incentives of the ODA. These interactions are important to understand, as the characteristics of a firm's capital structure will dictate the types of incentives best suited to promote rare disease drug development.

This project studies how parental resources affect children’s wellbeing, as measured by children’s health status and their cognitive, social, and emotional development. The first aim of this project is to examine how three broadly defined aspects of parental resources — economic status, family structure, and parental health (both mental and physical) — are related to each other. The second is to study how parental resources affect the quality of parenting (discipline, warmth, supervision, and cognitive stimulation) and material resources (e.g., home learning materials, food security, neighborhood safety, and access to medical care) that children receive. Finally, the researchers are examining how all of these “inputs,” in turn, affect children’s outcomes. A specific “case study” is on the determinants of childhood obesity, a preventable child health outcome that is the precursor of adult obesity. The study utilizes newly collected data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a new survey that follows birth cohorts of 3,675 children born to unwed parents, and 1,125 children born to married parents, from twenty US cities in fifteen states, from birth to age four. A key advantage of this survey is that it tracks and collects information from fathers, including those who do not live with their children. Using the Fragile Families data, it is possible to study the role of fathers in children’s health and developmental outcomes. The project also uses data from other surveys, including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Health Interview Survey. The results of this research provide valuable information on the determinants of children’s wellbeing, and the mechanisms through which parental resources affect children’s outcomes. Project website.