Health and Retirement Study

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS)[1] is a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of Americans over age 50 conducted by the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The study interviews approximately 20,000 respondents every two years on subjects like health care, housing, assets,[2] pensions,[3] employment and disability. The study is managed through a cooperative agreement (NIA U01AG009740) between the NIA, which provides primary funding, and the ISR, which administers and conducts the survey. Beginning in 2012, HRS began adding genetic information from consenting participants to its database.[4] The economic measures captured by the data in the HRS are regarded as being of very high quality.[5]

  1. ^ National Institute on Aging, Growing Older in America: The Health and Retirement Study Archived 2007-06-23 at the Wayback Machine, Washington, DC, National Institutes of Health, 2007.
  2. ^ Hurd, M.D., Juster F.T. and Smith J.P. Enhancing the Quality of Data on Income: Recent Innovations from the HRS. In: Journal of Human Resources, 38 (3), Summer 2003, pp. 758-772.
  3. ^ Gustman, A. L., Mitchell, O. S., Samwick, A. A., and Steinmeier, T. L. Evaluating Pension Entitlements. In: Forecasting Retirement Needs and Retirement Wealth, eds. Mitchell, O., Hammond, B., and Rappaport, A. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. pp. 309-326.
  4. ^ "NIA adds genetic data to Health and Retirement Study"[permanent dead link], Washington, DC, National Institutes of Health, 2012.
  5. ^ French, E., Jones, J. & McCauley, J. (2017). The Accuracy of Economic Measurement in the Health and Retirement Study. Forum for Health Economics and Policy, 0(0), pp. -. Available at doi:10.1515/fhep-2017-0001