Our Work

Get to know Joanne Kenen, the first Commonwealth Fund Journalist in Residence at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Care partners have an active role during medical visits of older adults with hearing loss (HL) and dementia. Efforts to support care partner engagement and teach advocacy skills may close gaps in care quality for the subgroup of older adults who are living with HL and dementia.

Understanding cognitive health, its decline, and the investments that shape its age profile in later life are important in an aging society, and yet, estimating the cognitive health production function is complicated by non-random mortality and sample attrition. The author studies this dynamic selection problem in the context of education, race, and cigarette smoking, characteristics thought to affect the level, but not slope, of cognitive decline. The author develops a general framework that involves estimation of a system of dynamic equations consistent with the Grossman (1972) model.