DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Berkeley Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) has had NIA support for 19 years. During that time, CEDA has earned an international reputation as one of the leading research centers in the world for the economics and demography of aging, complementing the Department of Demography as a leading training program in demography and aging. CEDA membership has grown from about a dozen initially, to 39 members now, with primary disciplinary affiliations in Demography (11), Economics (22), Biology (4), and Sociology (2). The 39 members of CEDA are exceptionally distinguished, including: 1 Nobel Prize, 4 John Bates Clark, 5 Nat Academy of Science, 2 MacArthur, 3 Sheps, 1 Taueber, and 3 Arrow Awards. CEDA has fully or partially funded 18 major workshops during the first four years of the current grant cycle and 16 pilot awards; CEDA support has resulted in 32 grant applications and 9 R-series NIH grants. Prominent dissemination has been via National Academy of Science panels, and adoption of methods and concepts by major entities such as the United Nations. CEDA research encompasses four signature themes: (1) Demographic and fiscal consequences of global aging, including the National Transfer Accounts project, (2) Mortality and health, including the Human Mortality Database project, (3) Biodemography of aging, and (4) Behavioral economics. Highly innovative new applications are forthcoming in the next cycle for promoting path-breaking research on the economics and demography of aging in all four areas, including projects cutting across these areas such as empirical Bayesian mortality projection methods, genomic analysis of longevity, and behavioral economics analysis and novel intervention applications around financial and health behaviors. An important form of CEDA support in the next cycle will be facilitating "big data" population science analyses with innovative new data resources being generated by CEDA members.

PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Longer life and improving health status change the parameters of the life cycle and require changes in saving behavior, retirement age, intergenerational relations, and so on. Increases in obesity and decreases in smoking behavior influence these trends. Longer life and lower fertility lead to population aging which brings additional need to adjust institutions, policies and individual behavior. The proposed aging center will study these changes at the level of the individual and society, and consider the adequacy of our decision making capabilities in the face of these challenges.