Research Project
10287956
PROJECT SUMMARY Older Americans face unique challenges to their health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Older adults and those with chronic health conditions are particularly vulnerable to severe complications from the disease, and the need for physical distancing amplifies the impact of the virus by limiting access to support systems. Threats to health and economic well-being posed by COVID-19 are even more severe for older Americans who are poor, less-educated, and non-White because they tend to have poorer health and greater exposure to the virus relative to their respective counterparts. Help from family, including time spent in running errands and hands-on caregiving, money, and shared housing, is likely to be crucial for older adults facing health and economic challenges to endure and maintain well-being. The pandemic only increases this need, just as required physical distancing also affects the ability to receive hands-on care, whether related to the virus or not, and help with household tasks that approximately 11 million Americans aged 65 and older receive from caregivers. Variation across families in the need for and ability to provide help is magnified by the fact that health and economic risks are correlated within families. Exposure to the consequences of the virus is also correlated across families because families tend to live near one another, especially non-White and less-educated families. The proposed project will use new data from the Health and Retirement Study including the new COVID-19 Module to address three Specific Aims: (1) how health, access to health care, and economic well-being of older adults changed with the onset and progression of the pandemic; (2) whether adult children?s transfers of time, money, and coresidence responded to the pandemic-related challenges older adults faced; and (3) whether proximity of families improved or detracted from responses to the pandemic-related challenges of older adults. In each of these aims, we estimate differences across socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity, and across geographic areas that differed in the severity of the pandemic. We attempt to estimate causal effects of the impact of the virus on the well-being of older adults and on family response to changes in well-being using a combination of subjective assessments elicited from respondents and analytic strategies that exploit variation in the severity of the virus across geography and time, in state-level policy responses, and in individuals? vulnerability to the virus based on their preexisting health conditions. The results will provide a comprehensive understanding of how the health and economic conditions of older Americans changed during the pandemic and how these challenges that older Americans faced rippled across family members, both coresidential and non- coresidential. More broadly, the results will characterize the strength of the family safety net and disparities in it across socioeconomic status and race-ethnicity and the effectiveness of families in protecting one another against shocks to health and well-being.
