News Release

DEAR Program Receives Funding to Become DEAR Center

September 23, 2004

The Carolina Population Center (CPC) at UNC Chapel Hill has been awarded a center grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to support the Demography and Economics of Aging Research (DEAR) program. The DEAR program was initiated at CPC in collaboration with the Institute on Aging in 2000 with start-up funding from NIA to support a research program in population aging. The program has been successful in stimulating new research on population aging issues at UNC, and has now successfully competed for a center grant award of one million dollars over four years.

The DEAR program has supported population aging research at UNC-CH by (1) awarding seed grants for pilot projects to support development of proposals for external funding; (2) initiating and supporting establishment of a secure data facility for analysis of restricted-use population aging data at CPC; (3) bringing prominent outside speakers to campus to discuss their population aging research; and (4) establishing a working group to foster increased collaboration among UNC-CH scholars with research interests in population aging. The DEAR Center will continue to support all of these activities, now at a higher level.

The director of the DEAR Center is David Blau, Professor of Economics and CPC Fellow, and the associate director is Edward Norton, Associate Professor of Health Policy and Administration (HPAA).

The research topics investigated by affiliates of the DEAR program span a broad range of the population aging field, including topics such as the adequacy of saving for retirement, the economic and health-related determinants of the timing of exit from the labor force, health care expenditure at the end of life, early life antecedents of later life health outcomes, long-term care decisions, determinants of health over the life course, changing intergenerational relations in rapidly aging developing countries, determinants of mortality in low-income countries, changing patterns of diseases of the elderly in low-income countries, and measurement of living standards of the elderly. The DEAR program is described in more detail at www.cpc.unc.edu/dear.