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This chapter describes how differences in health status at retirement can influence the decision to purchase a life annuity. It extends previous research on annuitization decisions by incorporating the effect of health differentials via differences in survival throughout the latter portion of life. It then shows how precautionary savings motivated by uncertain out-of-pocket medical expenses influence annuitization decisions. Results show that annuities become less attractive to people facing uncertain medical expenses. While full annuitization would still be optimal if annuity markets were truly complete and both life- and health-contingent, lacking this, annuity equivalent wealth values are much lower for those in poor health, as compared to persons in good health.

This chapter discusses large-scale agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS). Useful features of toolkits are discussed and the Repast and Swarm toolkits are considered as examples. Important features of large-scale development environments are also presented. The large-scale modeling lifecycle is discussed including tools such as design patterns, with the “agent-based model” and the “scheduler scramble” design patterns used as examples.

This chapter discusses the events that comprise the normal lifecycle of a Kamar. It begins with child-birth, which is considered an event of great sociological significance. It relates the things a pregnant Kamar woman should not do, such as engage in sexual intercourse with her husband or go near burial grounds. It then looks at the birthing practices and describes the usual childhood of the Kamars. It notes the tribe's attitude towards menstruation, and explains how engagements and marriages are conducted within the tribe. It also discusses in detail dowry, elopement, divorce, and widowhood. Finally, the chapter discusses the sexual life of the Kamars, including fertility and premarital sex, and the ceremonies and rituals that are conducted upon the death of a tribe member.

This chapter explores both the promises and risks associated with rising interest in niche market drug development and concurrently, how drug regulatory reform efforts towards the “lifecycle” approach and more post-market evidence generation are both a response to and a driving force behind the shift towards niche markets. We argue that significant questions remain about whether regulatory authorities are prepared to address the attendant challenges that accompany the shift towards the lifecycle approach, particularly the concern that increasing the focus on post-market monitoring and evaluation may lead to a softening of regulatory control at market entry.

This chapter describes individuals' income-age trajectories. A picture of these looks like a plateful of cooked spaghetti but it is shown that this spaghetti can be unravelled using a statistical model. Differences in lifecycle income profiles reflect differences in income at the start of the working life and in income growth rates, and the association between initial incomes and income growth rates. There is also a role played by individual-specific income changes from one year to the next, representing transitory variation, measurement error, or events such as having children, or family formation or dissolution. The analysis is undertaken initially in terms of income measured in terms of wages but results are also presented for the needs-adjusted household income measure that is used throughout the rest of the book.

This chapter examines the impact of demographic change on South Africa’s economic growth. Estimates show two positive periods of the first demographic dividend in South Africa. The first began in 1977—after more than 25 years of negative dividend as a result of relatively high population growth—and peaked at over one percentage point during the early 1990s. The dividend then turned negative in 2007. The second period of positive dividend is expected to last from 2014 to beyond 2050, but is more moderate, raising the per capita economic growth rate by up to around 0.4 percentage points per annum at its peak around 2030.

This chapter talks about the lifecourse perspectives that contribute to an understanding of ageing and disability in rural places. It sheds some light on key assumptions about ageing, disability and rural places, and starts with a brief outline of the progress of literature from a lifecycle to a lifecourse framework. It identifies lifecourse theoretical advances that are related to disability and ageing in rural places. The chapter also addresses the way questions on ageing and disability in rural places can challenge present lifecourse analytic boundaries. It ends with a deconstruction of the notions of time, agency and location in time and space, as they relate to rural ageing and disability.

The purpose of an S-curve analysis is to understand and interpret the evolution of a market, product, or technology so as to make informed strategic decisions about where value may be created now and in the future. S-curves map out this evolution, from its relatively slow emergence, to the point where it begins to grow and growth accelerates, to the point where the market becomes saturated and growth begins to slow and even decline. This chapter discusses the underlying theory, core idea, depiction, process, insight or value created, and risks and limitations of S-curve analysis. The chapter also discusses the illustration of Spotify and applies the steps of S-curve analysis to this case.

In Chapter 9 I focus on the students of Al-Huda classes, both onsite and online. Most of the students who spoke to me were young adults—some married with children, some college students, and some professionals. Whether living in North America, Europe, or South Asia, they were drawn to Al-Huda for a variety of reasons, and all of them reported deriving strength from deepening their engagement with the Qur’an. Bilingual in English and a South Asian language, they were educated middle-class women discovering the Qur’an through Al-Huda classes. All of them had chosen to live a more orthoprax lifestyle in accordance with what they learned in the Al-Huda classes. But in order to succeed, I argue, they had to get their families’ support. They had to do da‘wa. In this chapter, I examine their life stories in light of the concepts of ‘precarity’ and gendered Islamophobia as articulated by Attiya Ahmad and Jasmin Zine, respectively.

This chapter provides an overview of the section of the text that examines family change. A main theme of the discussion is the emergence of the field of family economics and the importance of longitudinal studies for testing the theories this field has produced. One particular area of discussion is the chapters' contribution to our understanding of the long-term economic impacts of marriage, divorce, and changes in household structure.

The introductory chapter presents an overview of this volume which provides a structured examination of three of the most important events that occur in the lives of most adults: changes in employment, family, and health. The book's sections are organized around these events. Each section contains a chapter that provides an initial overview of how common it is to experience changes in employment, family, and health. Then, additional chapters are provided that examine both short and long-term consequences of events of each type. Because each individual topical area, such as job loss, might relate to the others, e.g. changes in family structure, each section includes a chapter that examines at least one of these interrelationships. As a whole, the studies contained in the volume demonstrate that very common life transitions are strongly linked to short and long-term economic well-being but also cascade into other areas of life.

This chapter presents an examination of the impact on net worth and savings of changes in family structure at older ages. The analysis demonstrates that married couples have more wealth than unmarried individuals primarily due to the higher lifetime earnings and lower mortality risk of married couples compared to unmarried individuals. Divorce at older ages both divides and consumes wealth and has negative and long-lasting consequences on wealth accumulation while remarriage rebuilds assets.

This chapter reconnects with interviewees five years after their first interviews to address two main questions. First, it assesses how participants interpret events like the 2014 online harassment campaign GamerGate. Surprisingly, interviewees revealed that GamerGate was not particularly significant to them; this situates the event in context, revealing it to be merely a symptom of gaming's deeper structures of sexism and backlash. At the same time, women’s split identity as female/gamer also played out in diverse ways when they were confronted with this event, again emphasizing the casualized era’s struggle between hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces. Second, this chapter analyzes how players’ gaming habits have changed more generally and what factors account for these changes, furthering our understanding of player lifecycle and providing a perspective on whether female gamers’ strategies for managing game environments are sustainable. Thus, this chapter serves as a relevant update to the conclusions put forth in the preceding chapters.

American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men’s labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation of older women consists disproportionately of those working at full-time jobs. Increased labor force participation of women in their older ages is part of the general increase in cohort labor force participation. Cohort effects, in turn, are mainly a function of educational advances and greater prior work experience. But labor force participation rates of the most recent cohorts in their forties are less than those for previous cohorts. These factors may suggest that employment at older ages will stagnate or even decrease. But several other factors will be operating in an opposing direction and leads us to conclude that women are likely to continue to work even longer.

It is well documented that individuals in couples tend to retire around the same time. But because women tend to marry older men, this means many married women retire at younger ages than their husbands. This fact is somewhat at odds with lifecycle theory that suggests women might otherwise retire at later ages than men because they have longer life expectancies, and often have had shorter careers on account of childrearing. As a result, the opportunity cost of retirement—in terms of foregone potential earnings and accruals to Social Security wealth—may be larger for married women than for their husbands. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I find evidence that the returns to additional work beyond mid-life are greater for married women than for married men. The potential gain in Social Security wealth alone is enough to place married women on nearly equal footing with married men in terms of Social Security wealth at age 70.

Black women in recent cohorts aged between 50 and 72 years have lower employment than similar white women, despite having had higher employment when they were middle-aged and younger. Earlier cohorts of older black women also worked more than their white counterparts. Although it is not surprising that white women’s employment should catch up to that of black women given trends in increasing female labor force participation, it is surprising that it should surpass that of black women. This chapter discusses factors that contribute to this differential change over time. Changes in education, marital status, home-ownership, welfare, wealth, and cognition cannot explain this trend, whereas changes in occupation, industry, health, and gross motor functioning may explain some of the trend.

The chapter investigates the wide variety of contexts, drivers and outcomes characterizing the Italian scene. Three paradigmatic case studies are presented in order to explore the lifecycle of community action and planning. The first – in the earthquake-hit city of L'Aquila – is a short-run case. The second – in the Sicilian city of Palermo – is at an embryonic stage. The third – in the town of Canelli, near Asti in Piedmont – appears as the more mature experience. Together they reveal how complex the balance between community mobilisation and municipal strategy is. In the first two cases the communities of interest appear frustrated by poor and intermittent institutional support, whilst the third case is biased towards an opaque planning process. The recurrent theme is the need to change the prevailing style of planning and make it more transparent, more interactive, and more open to innovation.

According to the simple lifecycle model single persons are predicted to decumulate assets at advanced age, when mortality risk is high, to reduce the risk of dying with substantial wealth. Empirically it has been difficult to show this prediction in micro data. In this chapter we discuss the most common limitations in existing data. We present lifecycle patterns of dissaving based on two very different kinds of data: those that are derived from wealth change, and those derived from measures of active saving defined as disposable income minus consumption. Based on wealth change we find substantial dissaving by single persons, but not by couples: apparently couples preserve wealth to provide for the surviving spouse. Active saving by single persons is negative implying wealth decumulation, but the predicted rate of wealth decline is smaller than the rate of observed wealth decumulation. Active saving by couples is positive. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between active saving and wealth change, including under-estimation of consumption, mis-measurement of taxes, and capital gains.

Becoming a woman intellectual in early modern England was no straightforward task. Financial dependence, lack of personal autonomy, marriage and motherhood could all bring pressures to bear on practices of self-development. However, it was from within these circumstances that women found ways to engage with the life of the mind. Moreover, the forms intellectual engagement took were informed by their domestic contexts and the patterns of exchange framed by letter-writing. This chapter explores the cultures of knowledge in which women made their mark. Female intellectual networks, opportunities for cross-gender exchange and amateur circles of scholarship all existed outside of traditional centres for intellectual production. These opportunities are considered in the context of other factors that affected female learning: the development of an intellectual identity, the changing demands of the lifecycle and the ramifications of public scrutiny of female achievement. These opportunities and obstacles for female intellectual engagement in this period will be explored through the qualitative detail offered by a series of examples of learned women.