Projecting how long you think you will live is a crucial exercise in retirement planning. An estimate of life expectancy could determine, for example, your savings rate, a portfolio allocation, or whether or not you should buy an annuity. The standard theoretical model predicts that individuals make unbiased estimates of their life expectancy based on personal, relevant information, such as family history, illness, lifestyle choices, and so on. But a new paper, funded by our consumer finance working group, suggests that life expectancy estimates can be, at least in part, also affected by irrelevant context factors -- in this case, the way survey questions are worded.

For their newly published article, John W. Payne, Namika Sagara, Suzanne Shu, Kirstin C. Appelt and Eric J. Johnson conducted experiments in which they asked half of the respondents to provide probabilities of their living to a certain age, and the other half to provide probabilities of their dying by a certain age. Ostensibly, these questions are asking the same thing, but the results yielded a surprising result: Those given the "live-to" question reported significantly higher chances of being alive at ages 55 through 95 than those who answered the "die-by" question. In fact, in the first two surveys, which included nearly 2,000 respondents, the mean life expectancy was 8.68 years higher in the live-to frame than the die-by frame.

Here are links to some of the interesting social science research we encountered during the week:

Michael Stoll has released a new U.S. 2010 research brief entitled "Great Recession Spurs a Shift to Local Moves." Here is the executive summary:

Americans are very mobile. Over the last three decades the percent of Americans who moved in a given year was always more than 10%. But mobility has been declining in this period. More telling, in the last decade and especially in the years just before and during the Great Recession, there was a consistent decline in long-range migrations and a rise in local moves. This report shows several ways in which the Great Recession was implicated in these trends.

Because the recession was nation-wide, it shut off the lure of “better job pastures” elsewhere. It officially dates from 2008 to 2010 but its impacts began sooner and lasted longer. Its key characteristics were an exploding housing “bubble” that led to a collapsed housing industry that spiked unemployment, which in turn led to more foreclosures and put great pressure on financial institutions. The Great Recession hurt, to varying degrees, all regions of the country. People seeking better jobs (or even jobs) could not simply move West, South, East or North.

More from RSF's U.S. 2010 Project
• Unauthorized Immigrant Parents: Do Their Migration Histories Limit Their Children's Education?
• An Uneven Road and Then a Cliff: US Labor Markets since 2000
• Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America
• How Changes in Employment, Earnings and Public Transfers Make the First Two Years of the Great Recession (2007-2009) Different from Previous Recessions and Why It Matters

The Great Recession forced more people to move locally. People moved the most in metropolitan areas with the highest unemployment, the highest foreclosures – particularly the West and South, areas hard hit by the Great Recession. People who lost their jobs and/or their homes moved locally, to someplace cheaper. Unlike the past decades, when local movers were moving up economically – from an apartment to a house, from one house to a better one – these movers were moving down economically, seeking a cheaper home.

Black residents were particularly vulnerable. Not only did more black residents, proportionally, lose jobs, those losses were more likely to force black residents to move. Similarly, ore black homeowners, proportionally, entered foreclosure, and they were more likely to end up moving than foreclosed whites.

In our last two posts on preschool education, we looked at the some of the lessons and results of recent expansions of preschool in France and Great Britain. Today, we turn our attention to research conducted on early education programs in America. In 2007, Brian A. Jacob and Jens Ludwig published a chapter on improving educational outcomes for poor children as part of our volume Changing Poverty, Changing Policies. Here is an excerpt from their review on early education:

Disparities in academic achievement by race and class are apparent as early as ages three and four, well before children enter kindergarten. Recent research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, economics, and other fields suggests that the earliest years of life may be a particularly promising time to intervene in the lives of low-income children (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000; Carniero and Heckman 2003; Knudsen et al. 2006). Studies show that early childhood educational programs can generate learning gains in the short run and, in some cases, improve the long-run life chances of poor children. Moreover, the benefits generated by these programs are large enough to justify their costs.

The Perry Preschool and Abecedarian programs are commonly cited as examples of high-quality preschool services that can change the lives of low-income children. A small group of children who participated in these programs in the 1960s and 1970s have been followed for many years and on average have better outcomes in a range of domains compared to a randomly assigned group of control children (Schweinhart et al. 2005; Ramey and Campbell 1979; Campbell et al. 2002; Barnett and Masse 2007). Despite the high cost of these programs, these studies suggest that their total economic benefit exceeded their costs (Belfield et al. 2006; Barnett and Masse 2007). Although these results are encouraging, it is important to keep in mind that these are model programs that were unusually intensive and involved small numbers of children in just two sites.

Nevertheless, the evidence on publicly funded early education programs, illustrating what can be achieved for large numbers of children in programs of variable quality, is also very encouraging. A recent random assignment evaluation of Head Start found positive short-term effects of program participation on a variety of cognitive skills on the order of 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations, with typically positive effects on noncognitive outcomes as well (though they are usually not statistically significant). A rigorous evaluation of Early Head Start, a program serving children under age three in a mix of home- and center-based programs, found positive effects on some aspects of parent practices and children’s development, but the effects were generally smaller than for Head Start (Love et al. 2002).

Last week, we shared some of our research on the minimum wage's impact on labor markets. Anrindrajit Dube, one of our grantees (and co-author of this important study on San Francisco's living wage ordinance), appeared recently on MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes show to give a broad overview of the conventional economic wisdom on the minimum wage, and why recent empirical evidence (including his own work) has complicated the argument. Watch the clip below (Dube starts to speak around the 4:00 minute mark):

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here are links to some of the interesting social science research we encountered during the week:

Yesterday, we looked at some of the lessons from Great Britain's recent push to expand access to preschool education. Today, we examine the preschool experience in France, where almost all children are enrolled in preschool at the age of three. First established in 1882, preschool -- or ecole maternelle -- has a long history in France, but the universal access that currently exists largely stems from reforms adopted in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, according to Christelle Dumas and Arnaud LeFranc, enrollment rates for three-year-olds increased from around 35 percent to more than 90 percent. Preschool conditions in France are similar to primary education -- instructors generally receive the same level of training as primary school teachers, and children receive a substantial amount of instruction (typically six hours per day, four days a week, and thirty-six weeks per year).

In their chapter in From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage, Dumas and LeFranc exploited this rapid rise in enrollment to assess the impact of preschool education on students' educational and labor market outcomes. Their study is important because there are relatively few assessments of universal access preschool programs; most research, at least in the United States, has focused on targeted experiments such as the Perry program. Dumas and LeFranc offer a generally positive assessment: they conclude that one additional year of French preschool reduced the probability of repeating first grade, and that attending preschool for two and three years, rather than one year, increased participants’ monthly wages by 3.2 percent and 3.6 percent respectively when they entered the labor market. Here is their summary of their main findings:

We find evidence that preschool has significant and lasting positive effects and helps children succeed in school and secure higher wages in the labor market. The effects on school performance are observed at different ages and through a variety of outcomes (number of repetitions, test scores, diplomas). Identification of long-lasting effects contradicts the results of Magnuson and her colleagues (2007) for the United States. More precisely, preschool does not provide a one-shot advantage but, rather, makes children more likely to succeed at each step of their schooling career and in the labor market. This suggests that this early intervention manages to affect more than just the cognitive level of the children. Unfortunately, the data do not allow us to identify what changes for the children who have attended preschool. Are they more able to concentrate? Have they developed social skills? Do they assimilate rules more easily? The answer is probably a mix of these mechanisms, but is a matter for future research to explore.