We propose to examine the economic precursors and consequences of widowhood. Pre-widowhood analyses will investigate the changes in economic status attributable to an illness or disability of soon-to-be deceased spouses. Post-widowhood analyses will study surviving spouses for several years after the widowhood event to determine the effects that the loss of a spouse has on the survivor's financial status and post-widowhood mortality. The sample will be comprised of couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) who experienced a widowhood event. These couples will be compared across time with a matched sample of couples who remain intact. This study will make two unique contributions to widowhood research. First, it will exploit a new version of the PSID data files which contains information on all sample households who ever participated in the study and, if applicable, the time and reason for their attrition from the sample. This attrition information will be used to assess whether serious nonresponse bias exists when investigating the longitudinal relationships between widowhood, economic status and widow mortality when panel nonrespondents are excluded from the analysis. Methods based on weighting techniques will be developed and implemented to address the issue of nonresponse bias for the widowed couples as well as for the sample of matched intact couples. Second, the project will obtain death certificates of PSID sample members from state vital statistics offices and link them to married individuals in the sample who died since the beginning of the PSID in 1968. The death certificates will provide information on the decedents' cause of death and the duration of the underlying condition which preceded the death. This information will be used to differentiate the widowed sample into chronic and sudden illness categories based on the decents' cause of death. The economic effects of widowhood will be re-assessed controlling for the spouse's cause of death.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter