THE HEALTH AND RETIREMENT STUDY:

A NATIONAL PUBLIC RESOURCE FOR THE STUDY OF AGING

AND THE OLDER POPULATION

National Press Foundation

Washington, DC
March 14, 2018

David R. Weir
Research Professor, Institute for Social Research
PI and Director, Health and Retirement Study
University of Michigan
The Health and Retirement Study is a
longitudinal project sponsored by the National
Institute on Aging (NIA U01AG009740) and the
Social Security Administration.
 GOALS FOR TODAY

• Introduce the HRS

• Describe its origin and purpose
• Give examples of its use
• Give examples of journalism based on it
• Give some suggestions of how HRS can help
you in your work
HRS IS NOT TYPICAL OF NIH STUDIES, OR
ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN GENERAL

• Remember the BASF ad slogan from the 1990s:

• “We don't make a lot of the products you buy.
We make a lot of the products you buy better”

• HRS doesn’t make a lot of the papers you read.

We make a lot of the papers you read better.
THE HEALTH AND RETIREMENT STUDY
MISSION
P
• The primary objective of the HRS is to design,
collect, and distribute high-quality data for a
community of scientific and policy researchers
who study individual aging processes and the
impact of population aging.

• We are not funded to conduct substantive

analysis and don’t promote policies or findings

• We do care a lot about getting the facts right

HRS AND AGING: SOME BACKGROUND
WHAT IS AGING?

• Two related but very different things

• Individual aging
• Population aging
INDIVIDUAL AGING: HAPPENS TO ALL OF US

• Unavoidable and inexorable

• Age-related disease
• Loss of physical and mental abilities, and people
 POPULATION AGING:
FROM DEMOGRAPHY TO POLITICS

Lower Increasing Stress on private,

fertility ratio of public and family
& retired age to systems for
Lower working age retirement income
mortality population and health care

Primary cause of government deficits in US and Europe

THE BABY BOOM AND AGING IN AMERICA:
THE RATIO OF PERSONS 65+ TO PERSONS 20-64

Dependency ratio
0.50

0.40

0.30

0.20

0.10
First boomer turns 65 in 2011 Last boomer turns 65 in 2029
0.00
THIS ALL SOUNDS PRETTY BAD

• Indeed, not many people wanted to study

aging because it was not “fun”
• About forty years ago that began to change
 Robert Butler, MD
(1927-2010)
• Geriatrician

• An early advocate for

looking at aging as an
opportunity

• Founded the National

Institute on Aging in 1975

• Sparked new paradigm for

research on aging
SOMEONE WHO IS AGING VERY SUCCESSFULLY

Bob Kahn at his 90th

birthday party

Professor of Psychology,
University of Michigan

Research Professor,
ISR, U Michigan
RESEARCH AGENDA FOR AGING
• Enormous variability in how fast or how well we
age
• Discover factors that
• Slow the process of aging
• Promote health and function
• Sustain economic and psychological well-being
• Share that knowledge to bring “successful”
aging to all
• Help to offset societal impact of population
aging
HOW HRS BEGAN
• 1980s review of research needs conducted by NIA
• Created in 1990 by a direct spending authorization
from Congress to the National Institute on Aging
(NIH) to provide data for the study of health and
retirement
• Competitive scientific review awarded to
Michigan/ISR
• Supported by the National Institute on Aging
through a cooperative agreement to the University
of Michigan (U01 AG009740), with additional
support from the Social Security Administration
 THE TWO MEN WHO MADE THE HRS
Richard Suzman, Director of
Behavioral and Social Research at NIA
(1942-2015)

F. Thomas Juster, Research

Professor, ISR; PI of HRS
(1926-2010)
 KEY FEATURES OF HRS

• Public use
• Longitudinal
• Multi-disciplinary
• Nationally representative
• Internationally comparable (harmonized)
HRS IS PUBLIC USE
TO MAXIMIZE ITS SCIENTIFIC IMPACT,
WHICH IS THE RETURN TO THE INVESTMENT
MADE BY NIA AND THE SOCIAL SECURITY
ADMINISTRATION
 1000
1500
2000
2500
3000

0
500
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
OVER 27,000 REGISTERED USERS

2008
2009
2010
2011
Annual New HRS User Registrations

2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
OVER 2500 PUBLICATIONS: NUMBER OF NEW PEER-
REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES PER YEAR USING HRS

300

250

200

150

100

50

0
2005

2008

2011
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004

2006
2007

2009
2010

2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
 GLOBAL EXPANSION OF THE HRS MODEL:
NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS PER WAVE, BY COUNTRY OR REGION

250000

200000 THA
BRA
IND
150000
CHN
IRL
KOR
100000
EU
ENG
MEX
50000
HRS

0
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014
HRS IS MULTI-DISCIPLINARY
AND MULTI-MODE BECAUSE LIFE IS
HOW SCIENTISTS LIKE TO THINK

Higher Social Security

benefits

Earlier retirement

Spouse’s job provides

health insurance
IF THAT’S YOUR MODEL YOU DESIGN YOUR
STUDY TO MEASURE THREE THINGS
• Social Security benefits
• Spousal insurance
• Retirement age
REAL LIFE IS NOT SO SIMPLE
HRS TRIES TO MEASURE AS MANY OF THOSE
DIFFERENT COLORED THREADS AS WE CAN

• Enables scientists to pick out and focus on the

ones they want
• While other scientists look at it differently
• This makes for a complex project and not a
short simple survey
• But it makes for successful aging research
 CORE CONTENT AREAS IN HRS
• Health
 Physical/psychological self-report, conditions, disabilities; biomarkers and
genetics; cognitive testing; health behaviors (smoking, drinking, exercise)
• Health Services
 Utilization, expenditure, insurance, out-of-pocket spending, linkage to
Medicare
• Labor Force
 Employment status/history, earnings, disability, retirement, type of work
• Economic Status
 Income by source, wealth by asset type, capital gains/debt, consumption;
linkage to pensions, Social Security earnings/benefit histories
• Family Structure
 Extended family, proximity, transfers to/from of money, time, housing
• Expectations
 Decision making; subjective probabilities
THE CORE SURVEY INTERVIEW ITSELF IS THE
MOST COMPLEX IN THE WORLD:
• Approximately 5,000 possible questions
• Each personal interview gets about 400, takes
90 minutes by phone, over 2 hours in person
• Many, many computer-programmed steps to
determine who gets asked which questions,
designed to avoid repetitive or irrelevant
questions
• Analysts have to navigate those steps
 BIOMARKERS
• Psychosocial mailback questionnaire
• Height, weight, waist
• Grip strength, gait speed, lung function
• Blood pressure
• From dried blood spots
• HbA1c
• Total and HDL cholesterol
• CRP
• Cystatin-C
• Saliva samples for DNA
• Serum and plasma in repository
 ADMINISTRATIVE LINKAGES
• Individual match
 Social Security applications and benefits
 W-2 earnings
 Medicare claims data (Parts A, B, some D)
 CMS Minimum Data Set, OASIS home health
 Medicaid Analytic Extract
 Veteran’s Administration
• Employer match
 Form 5500
 Pension plans
• Contextual data resource—geographic linkages
 Census and environmental data
 Health care markets
HRS MEASURES MANY THINGS WELL

• For most of the things we measure there are

other studies that specialize in that thing
• Current Population Survey – labor force
• National Health Interview Survey and National
Health and Nutrition Examination Survey – health
• Survey of Consumer Finances – wealth
• We don’t aim to replace those studies but we
do like to verify that we match up well
SYSTOLIC BLOOD PRESSURE:
HRS VS NHANES: SYSTOLIC BLOOD PRESSURE

100%
90%
Percent with BP above indicated level

80%
70%
60%
50% NHANES 2005-08
HRS 2006
40%
HRS 2008
30%
20%
10%
0%
90 100 110 120 130 140 150 160 170 180 190 200
mmHg
MEDIAN WEALTH OF HOUSEHOLDS 55
AND OLDER—SCF AND HRS (2008
DOLLARS)
250,000

200,000

150,000
SCF
100,000 HRS

50,000

0
1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
 SURVIVAL BY COHORT: HRS VS LIFE TABLES

1
hrs us
0.9
hrs
0.8
coda us
0.7
coda
0.6 wb us

0.5 wb

0.4 ahd us

ahd
0.3
ebb us
0.2
ebb
0.1
1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013
THE POWER OF THE STUDY COMES FROM
COMBINING THE DIFFERENT MEASURES

• As in gradient in health or mortality

 The Gradient in Social Isolation:
Relative risk of mortality by quintile of social
isolation (controlling for age and sex)
3.5

2.5

1.5

1
High Low
Social Isolation
 The Gradient in Conscientiousness:
Relative risk of mortality by quintile of
conscientiousness (controlling for age and sex)
3.5

2.5

1.5

1
Low High
Conscientiousness
 The Gradient in Wealth:
Relative risk of mortality by quintile of wealth
(controlling for age and sex)
3.5

2.5

1.5

1
Bottom 20% Top 20%
Quintile of Wealth
HRS IS LONGITUDINAL BECAUSE AGING
TAKES TIME AND BECAUSE IT HELPS TO
UNTANGLE THE CAUSAL THREADS
 SOME SUMMARY STATISTICS

• 42,000 people have participated

• 240,000+ interviews completed
• 500,000+ person-years of observation
• 12,000+ retirements
• 5,000+ cases of incident dementia
• 16,000+ deaths
DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS BY WORK STATUS

2.5

1.5 Working
Not Working
1

0.5

0
50 55 60 65 70 75
 USE LONGITUDINAL DATA

• More depressed workers are more likely to quit

• Quitting is associated with an improvement in
level of depression
• Voluntary retirement is not depressing

Kerwin Kofi Charles, (2004), IS RETIREMENT DEPRESSING?: LABOR FORCE

INACTIVITY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING IN LATER LIFE, in Solomon
W. Polachek (ed.) Accounting for Worker Well-Being (Research in Labor
Economics, Volume 23) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.269 - 299
SOME EXAMPLES OF HOW HRS HAS HELPED
SHATTER MYTHS ABOUT SUCCESSFUL AGING
RETIREMENT: SUCCESSFUL AGING?
• Negative view:
• People quit or get fired when their health fails
• Consumption drops at retirement, or falls during
retirement
• Many people dissatisfied
• Positive view:
• People retire because they can afford to
• Consumption is maintained, wealth preserved
• Satisfaction is high
WIDE VARIATION IN THE AGES AT WHICH
PEOPLE RETIRE IN THE US
6.0%

5.0%
Percent of Men Retiring

4.0%

3.0%

2.0%

1.0%

0.0%
52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84
 IMPORTANCE OF HEALTH AS A FACTOR IN
RETIREMENT, BY AGE AT RETIREMENT
• Health is most
100%
important for early
80%
retirement
60% • Health not very
40% important in
20% retirement at
0% normal ages
52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68
PERCENT VERY SATISFIED WITH RETIREMENT,
BY AGE AT RETIREMENT
• Satisfaction is lowest
60% for early retirement
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68
MOST PEOPLE ARE HEALTHY ENOUGH TO WORK INTO THEIR
70S: WORK STATUS AND WORK ABILITY, BY AGE (HRS 2004)
120%

100%

13%
80%
19%

34%
60% 44%

51%
40% 50%

41%
20%

0%
51-56 57-61 62-64 65-69 70-74 75-79 80+

Working Able but Not Working Unable

Source: D.R. Weir, “Are Baby Boomers Living Well Longer” in Madrian,
Mitchell, and Soldo, Redefining Retirement 2007.
WHAT ABOUT CONSUMPTION EXPENDITURES
IN RETIREMENT? THE NEGATIVE VIEW

• “The facts are not in dispute. Many households spend a

great deal less after retirement than they did before”
• Ameriks, Caplin, and Leahy, REStat 2006
• “Many retirees . . . Take stock of their finances only to
discover that their resources are insufficient to maintain
their accustomed standard of living”
• Bernheim, Skinner, and Weinberg, AER 2001
• The problem is this was based on comparing
retired people to different people who were
working, not on following people over time into
retirement
WHEN WE LOOK AT LONGITUDINAL DATA

• Michael Hurd and Susann Rohwedder using

HRS, NBER WP 13929, 2008:
• Average drop at retirement ~5%
• Mainly at lower wealth where involuntary
retirement more common
• Work-related expenditures
• Sarah Smith using the British Household Panel
Survey. Economic Journal, 2006
• Consumption drop mostly limited to unanticipated,
involuntary retirement
WELL, MAYBE THEY CAN KEEP IT UP FOR A WHILE, BUT DO
THEY RUN OUT OF MONEY LATER?

• Couples
preserve
wealth to
advanced
age
• Widows
dissave
 DISAPPEARANCE OF DEFINED BENEFIT PENSION PLANS
HAS REDUCED RETIREMENT PREPAREDNESS – MYTH?

• From 1950s to 1980s most private firms who offered

pensions used DB plans in which you got a fixed payment in
retirement based on salary and years of service
• Since then most private firms switched to defined
contribution (DC) plans in which workers save in personal
accounts with some employer contribution
• Certainly the benefits of DB plans have been exaggerated
• Penalized worker mobility
• Firms did not always fund adequately and bankruptcy of firm led
to bankruptcy of pension plan
• Many workers not offered or got nothing from DB plans
• But what happened to retirement wealth as the private
sector switched almost completely from DB to DC?
 HRS LONGITUDINAL SAMPLE DESIGN WITH
REFRESHMENT OF NEW COHORTS
AGE
90

85

AHEAD
<1924
80

75

CODA
1924-30
70

65

60

HRS
55 1931-41
WB EBB MBB LBB
1942-47 1948-53 1954-59 1960-65
50
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016
YEAR
COMPONENTS OF FULL WEALTH FOR
INDIVIDUALS AGED 51-56, BY YEAR ($2010)

Wealth 1992 1998 2004 2010

Housing and
financial 176,744 177,530 217,082 179,699
DC + IRA 37,299 64,906 66,106 70,915
DB 109,856 108,086 60,549 35,881
Social
Security 104,139 104,154 120,166 127,313

Total 428,038 454,676 463,903 413,806

Chichun Fang, Charles Brown, and David Weir, “Cohort Changes in Social
Security Benefits and Pension Wealth” Michigan Retirement Research Center
Working Paper WP 2016-350, 2016.
SINCE THE STUDY BEGAN IN 1990, OVER 400
NEWS ARTICLES HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ON
THE HEALTH AND RETIREMENT STUDY AND
ON RESEARCH BASED ON THE HRS DATA.

Some are better than others

 NEW YORK TIMES

• Cites HRS research

showing older
women’s labor force
participation is
steadily increasing
• Some because they
want to
• Some because they
have to

Want to: Goldin & Mitchell (2017) The new life cycle of women’s employment,
Journal of Economic Perspectives
Need to: Lusardi & Mitchell (2016) Older women’s labor market attachment,
retirement planning, and household debt, NBER
 WALL STREET JOURNAL

• Followed workers from

early 50s to age 65
• 13 percent voluntarily
changed jobs
• Job changers more likely to
be working at age 65
• net of other important
factors

Sanzenbacher, Sass, & Gillis (2017) How job

changes affect retirement timing by
socioeconomic status. Center for Retirement
Research at Boston College.
NEW YORK TIMES AND MANY OTHER OUTLETS

• Financial burden of dementia

at least as high as cancer or
heart disease
• Half is unpaid family care
• Costs will double in 30 years
Hurd et al. (2013). Monetary costs of dementia in the
Unites States, New England Journal of Medicine
Barry Bosworth, Gary Burtless, and Kan Zhang, “Later Retirement, Inequality In
Old Age, And The Growing Gap In Longevity Between Rich And Poor,” Brookings
Economic Studies, January 2016
 A GOOD EXAMPLE

Retiring (Again and Again) in America

• Some 40 percent of Americans age 65 and older who are currently

employed were retired at some time in the past, according to a 2017
Rand Corp. study authored by Nicole Maestas, an economist and
associate professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School.
She used data from the Health and Retirement Study, funded by the
National Institute on Aging, which has tracked thousands of people age
50 and older over the past two decades.
CHICKEN OR EGG?

Here’s Why Your Brain Needs You to

Read Every Single Day
in 2016, when researchers at the Yale School of Public Health
dug into 12 years of HRS data about the reading habits and
health of more than 3,600 men and women over the age of 50,
a hopeful pattern emerged: People who read books—fiction or
nonfiction, poetry or prose—for as little as 30 minutes a day
over several years were living an average of two years longer
than people who didn’t read anything at all.
A NOT-SO-GOOD EXAMPLE

“About one-third of Americans retire and claim their Social Security benefits as soon as
they become eligible at 62, but a new study from researchers at Cornell University and
the University of Melbourne suggests it might be in their best interest to punch in for a
few more years.”
“Harvard’s ongoing U.S. Health and Retirement Study of 5,422 people has found that
retirees are 40% more likely to have had a heart attack or stroke than those who were
still working”
SOME CONCRETE SUGGESTIONS ON HOW HRS
CAN HELP YOU WRITE BETTER STORIES:
THE THREE C’s

• When you first think of a story related to health

and retirement in the older population,
whether it’s based on a published paper, or a
policy proposal, or a bigger thought piece
• Contact
• Confirm
• Cite
CONTACT

• Amanda Sonnega at HRS

• asonnega@umich.edu
• Barbara Cire at NIA
• cireb@mail.nih.gov

• Why?
• They can help firm up the concept
• They know the experts who can help
• With perspective, context, and commentary
• With data and analysis
OTHER RESOURCES

• Online help desk

• hrsquestions@umich.edu
• Online searchable bibliography of publications
using HRS
• https://hrs.isr.umich.edu/publications/biblio/
• HRS “databooks”
• Growing Older in America
https://hrs.isr.umich.edu/about/data-book-2006
• Aging in the 21st Century
https://hrs.isr.umich.edu/about/data-book
CONFIRM

• Please make sure the research you are

following is legitimate, uses the study correctly,
and represents its contribution correctly
• Get perspective on the causal relationship at
issue.
• (In general, “retirement causes X” is likely to be
questionable 9 out 10 times)
CITE

• NIA and SSA have invested a lot in having the

HRS as a public resource on these issues
• We appreciate getting credit, and we
understand we won’t always get it
• Researchers who do analysis and write papers
deserve credit for that work
• Just, please, give credit where it’s due and not
where it’s not
• HRS doesn’t “show that retirement caused X”
• Researchers didn’t collect data for 25 years
GIVE US A LITTLE TIME TO HELP

• Guesswork and unsubstantiated opinion can be

had on short deadlines
• Truth takes a little longer
 THANK YOU!

http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/
And now on twitter @hrsisr