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Advanced Education and Mortality Compression in the United States 147
sponsored by the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and conducted
by the University of Michigan. The HRS consists of six cohorts:
(1) Initial HRS cohort, born 1931 to 1941, first interviewed in 1992.
(2) AHEAD cohort, born before 1924, initially a separate study (The
Study of Assets and Health Dynamics among the Oldest Old), first
interviewed in 1993.
(3) Children of Depression (CODA) cohort, born 1924 to 1930, first
interviewed in 1998.
(4) War Baby (WB) cohort, born 1942 to 1947, first interviewed in
1998.
(5) Early Baby Boomer (EBB) cohort, born 1948 to 1953, first
interviewed in 2004.
(6) Mid Baby Boomer (MBB) cohort, born 1954 to 1959, first
interviewed in 2010.
The institutional population was not initially included in the
HRS sample at baseline interview, but the respondents are followed
into institutions, so institutional respondents are also included in the
current data. Since the HRS is a longitudinal survey, survival status
is available not only from National Death Index, but also obtained
during follow-up interviews. Overall, the HRS is representative of
the U.S. non-institutional population aged 51 years and older and
their spouses. This study makes use of HRS Rand file (version O,
1992-2012) with 37,317 observations, and the analytical sample is
age 50 and over (RAND Center for the Study of Aging, 2016).
B.
Education
Education is reported in terms of years of formal schooling for
respondents. I distinguish older Americans’ educational attainment
into two sets of the categories: (1) 0-11 years, 12 years, and 13+
years; (2) 0-11 years, 12 years, 13-15 years, and 16+ years. The first
set of categories is consistent with the fitting form Montez et al.
(2012) and Brown et al. (2012). The second set of categories is the