DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal requests support for the archiving and dissemination of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data. CHARLS is a survey of the middle aged and elderly in China, run by the National School for Development (China Center for Economic Research) at Peking University, together with the Institute of Social Science Surveys at Peking University. It is based on a sample of households with members aged 45 years and older. It is designed to produce a high quality public micro-database, which can provide a wide range of information from socio-economic status to health conditions, to serve the needs of scientific research on the elderly in China. CHARLS is also designed to allow comparisons with other studies in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) family of studies. This project will support creating of special user friendly data sets from the national baseline of 2011 12 and the first follow-up wave in 2013. With the support requested in this application we will create user friendly longitudinal data sets and use the best practice available to impute Income, expenditure and wealth variables for the first two waves.

PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) will enrich the international landscape of aging studies. CHARLS follows closely the format and content of existing Health and Retirement Studies around the world in order to provide the capability for scholars to engage in comparative studies as well as studies of the special conditions in China. The national baseline of CHARLS was conducted in 2011-12, and the first follow-up wave of CHARLS was fielded in 2013. This project will make the first two waves of CHARLS data easier to use by users worldwide.