It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
Metal-free batteries raise hope for more sustainable and economical grids
KING ABDULLAH UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (KAUST)
IMAGE: ILLUSTRATION OF THE HIGH-EFFICIENCY METAL-FREE BATTERY DEVELOPED BY KAUST RESEARCHERS. UNLIKE CONVENTIONAL BATTERIES, THIS BATTERY COMBINES AN AMMONIUM-CATION-CONTAINING ELECTROLYTE WITH CARBON-BASED ELECTRODES.view more
Rechargeable batteries that use ammonium cations as charge carriers could provide ecofriendly and sustainable substitutes to metal-ion-based batteries, researchers at KAUST show.
Metal-ion batteries, such as lithium-ion batteries, are the go-to energy storage solution. They dominate the market for portable consumer electronics and electric vehicles because of their high energy density and versatility. However, metal ions used in the electrolytes come from limited and declining resources, which threatens long-term availability. Their toxicity and flammability can be unsafe and harmful to the environment.
There have been several attempts to generate ammonium-ion-based batteries to solve sustainability and environmental issues because these cations are lightweight and easy to synthesize and recycle. However, ammonium cations are prone to reduction into hydrogen and ammonia at low operation potential, preventing the batteries from achieving their full potential. They also dissolve readily in electrolytes, making them difficult to incorporate into electrode materials.
Husam Alshareef, postdoc Zhiming Zhao and coworkers developed a high-efficiency metal-free battery by combining an ammonium-cation-containing electrolyte with carbon-based electrodes. The graphite cathode and the organic semiconductor anode are cheap, environmentally friendly and renewable, Zhao says.
With the ammonium cations, the researchers chose hexafluorophosphate ions as negative charge carriers and exploited the ability of graphite to reversibly accommodate these anions within its layers to create a “dual-ion” battery. In the battery, cations and anions simultaneously insert into their corresponding electrode during charge cycles and are released into the electrolyte during discharge cycles.
This differentiates our work from other studies, Zhao says.
“We designed an electrolyte that is both antioxidative and antireductive by screening a series of solvents resistant to high voltage and also taking into account its reduction stability,” Zhao says.
The antioxidative solvent mainly solvated anions participating in the cathode reaction, while its antireductive counterpart formed a solvation sphere around cations involved in the anode reaction. “This configuration is crucial for battery stability,” Zhao explains.
The battery outperformed existing ammonium-ion-based analogues with a record operation voltage of 2.75 volts. “It is now possible to develop high-energy nonmetallic ion batteries that can compete with metal-ion batteries,” Zhao says.
The team is currently working to enhance the performance to get closer to large-scale applications. “We are exploring anode materials with a higher capacity, which is crucial for improving the energy density,” Zhao says.
Alshareef’s group is developing cheap alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, particularly for grid-scale storage. “To eventually completely decarbonize the grid, the battery costs must significantly come down”, says Alshareef. Replacing lithium with nonmetallic charge carriers, such as ammonium ions, can help lower these costs.
School closures and emergency remote teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic put a particular strain on families with children with special educational needs. Yet, most parents felt competent in supporting the learning and remote schooling of their children, and they also enjoyed the increased freedom and autonomy, which made it possible to structure daily life according to their family’s needs and preferences. However, parents were nevertheless also concerned about the learning, well-being and relationships with friends of their children.
Emergency remote teaching forced families to tackle a new kind of challenge, as parents had to balance between the demands of their work and those of their children’s remote schooling. A new study among 120 parents in Finland, conducted by the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Turku, focuses on parents’ perspectives regarding their competence, autonomy, and relatedness, in relation to the schooling of their children with special educational needs.
Parents hoped for better teacher-parent interaction
Parental well-being is crucial to positive parent-child interaction, as well as to supporting child well-being. This is why the researchers wanted to pay attention to the strengths and challenges parents experienced regarding emergency remote teaching of their children with special educational needs at the beginning of the lockdown in Finland.
“Earlier studies have shown that emergency remote teaching and lockdowns had a major impact on the life of children with special educational needs, and on their families. For instance, the availability of therapy, rehabilitation and mental health support was often be reduced during lockdown. Children reacted to these changes with their behaviour, since there were also challenges related to children’s basic needs, such as social interaction, sleeping and eating,” Assistant Professor Kaisa Pihlainen of the University of Eastern Finland says.
Maintaining routines and essential relationships is crucial for many children with special educational needs. In some children, breaking routines caused anxiety, depression, or rule-breaking or aggressive behaviour.
“When emergency remote teaching began, parents felt that they did not receive adequate support from the school or from teachers, and home-school interaction was inadequate especially for children with special educational needs. According to parents, teachers did not ask about their views on things, nor enquired about the workload caused by remote schooling.”
According to Pihlainen, it seems that maintaining and offering different forms of support affect not only the learning of children, but also the well-being of their parents.
Hectic school environment replaced by more peaceful learning at home
Although most parents reported that they were able to support the learning and remote schooling of their children, flexibility on the part of their employer was needed. Some parents felt that their work kept piling up or was done poorly as a result of providing support for their children: after all, some of children needed constant parental support for their learning.
“From the perspective of family dynamics, remote schooling brought children and parents closer together. Instead of the hectic daily life of schools, parents were able to create their own routines at home, and children, for example, enjoyed their meals better than at school. In families with two parents, shared responsibility also supported parental well-being in the new situation.
Remote schooling also enabled the educational content to be broken down into smaller bits, allowing children to progress at their own pace.
Towards increasingly individualised learning?
Pihlainen says that the results of the study confirm earlier findings. The pandemic did not treat families equally: parents with a higher level of education were better equipped to support their children, whose learning wasn’t hampered by remote schooling.
“In the future, finding ways to strengthen all parents’ capacity to support their children’s learning as part of the basic mission of the school is something to look into.”
According to Pihlainen, the benefits of remote teaching should also be reaped. The traditional school environment can be noisy and restless, in contrast to the possible peace and quiet of home. Being able to progress at one’s own pace and having the opportunity to concentrate support well-being and promote learning.
“We could consider how these observations can be made use of in the everyday life of schools, as well as on any future periods of remote teaching. Could our schools in the future offer calmer environments for learning and enable a more flexible and individualised pace of learning? Technology could also be better utilised, for example in the case of children’s travel or long-term illness,” Pihlainen concludes.
Parents’ competence, autonomy, and relatedness in supporting children with special educational needs in emergency remote teaching during COVID-19 lockdown.
Subway stations near river tunnels have worst air quality
NYU LANGONE HEALTH / NYU GROSSMAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Subway riders waiting in stations near tunnels that run below the city’s rivers are exposed to higher levels of hazardous pollutants than are found in other stations. The “river-tunnel effect,” as researchers call it, may help explain extremely poor air quality in the nation’s largest underground transit system and have particular implications for stations close to rivers in general.
In a previous investigation of New York’s subways, researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine found considerable variation in air quality among city subway stations. While some had pollutant levels a few times higher than that of outdoor air, the air quality in others was comparable to sooty air contaminated by forest fires or building demolitions.
To better understand why, the NYU Grossman research team measured air quality samples in 54 NYC stations during morning rush hour. They found that stations neighboring river tunnels had 80% to 130% higher concentrations of potentially dangerous particles in the air compared with stations only two or three stops further away from rivers. The new study published online Dec. 30 in the journal Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment.
“Our findings help explain why some underground subway stations are more polluted than others,” says study lead author David Luglio, MS; a doctoral student at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “Those subway stations closest to rivers clearly must be prioritized during cleaning efforts.”
To explain the “river-tunnel effect,” Luglio notes that while many tunnels in the city’s underground subway system have some degree of air exchange with the surface, those traveling beneath water have more limited ventilation. As a result, harmful debris gets trapped and builds up over time. Trains passing through may then throw these iron and carbon particles back into the air and push them into the closest stations — those at either end of the tunnel.
The investigation, which Luglio says is the largest exploration to date of how river tunnels influence air quality in underground subway stations, also revealed that proximity to a river tunnel was the strongest factor in predicting a station’s pollution levels, followed by its age. Other potential contributors, such as station size and depth, did not appear to play a major role in air quality differences.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority reported that 5.5 million people rode New York City’s subways every day in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began. According to past research, passengers were exposed to air with high levels of particles, which experts have linked to lung and heart disease as well as overall higher risk of death.
For the investigation, researchers collected over 100 air samples in stations between February and March 2022. Among the results, the study showed that on average, pollutant levels in all measured stations exceeded the daily exposure limit advised by the Environmental Protection Agency, which assesses potential health hazards in the environment.
For comparison, and to confirm the river-tunnel effect, the study team measured particle buildup on the B-line, a train route that crosses the East River via a bridge instead of passing beneath the water. Notably, pollutant levels in the two stations closest to the river on this train route were lower than that of stations farther away — as expected, the reverse of the river-tunnel phenomenon.
“Now that our results have identified key contributors to poor air quality in New York City’s underground subway stations, we have a better idea of where to improve conditions in the most contaminated areas of the transit system,” says study senior author Terry Gordon, PhD. “Increasing ventilation and scrubbing the tunnel walls and floors to remove continually recycling debris may make stations safer for riders and transit workers,” adds Gordon, a professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health.
Gordon, also a member of NYU Langone’s Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards, cautions that since the investigation only explored subways in New York City, it remains unclear whether the river-tunnel effect occurs in other cities as well.
He adds that the study team next plans to examine the effects of subway contaminants on human cells to better pinpoint the level of exposure needed to pose a risk to human health.
Funding for the study was provided by National Institutes of Health grants ES000260 and ES007324. Further funding was provided by the NY/NJ Occupational Safety and Health Center ERC Pilot Project Award grant T42 OH008422.
In addition to Luglio and Gordon, other NYU Langone study investigators involved in the study were Tri Huynh, BS; and Antonio Saporito, BS.
JOURNAL
Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment
IMAGE: EXAMPLE OF IMAGE SHOWN TO CONSUMERS FOR OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY STUDY.view more
CREDIT: OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Consumers are willing to pay more for familiar, versus unfamiliar, varieties of cheese if there is a sticker on the cheese indicating it won an award or if sensory information about the cheese – such as a description of its taste or food pairing suggestions – is included, a new study from Oregon State University shows.
The study also identified two broad groups of consumers whose cheese buying preferences differ. A group that prefers unfamiliar foods is willing to pay a premium for unfamiliar cheeses and an award sticker plays a much more important role than sensory information. The opposite is true for consumers who prefer familiar cheese varieties: sensory information play a much stronger role in willingness to pay more.
The study was in part motivated by the shift to online grocery shopping, which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While online grocery shopping has its notable advantages, the researchers note, the impacts can vary greatly for different food categories.
For example, specialty food products such as wine or cheese that are made on a small scale and have traditionally relied on in-person recommendations or product sampling might be more in need of new marketing strategies because online shopping can’t provide a real-time, in-person tasting experience.
“This is an under-studied area that is growing in importance, especially as people shift to buying groceries online and as subscription food boxes grow in popularity,” said Nadia Streletskaya, an assistant professor of applied economics at Oregon State. “Our study can help specialty food producers, many of whom operate on a small scale with limited budgets, determine best ways to promote their products.”
The researchers expect that the patterns they found with artisan cheese consumers could hold for buyers of other specialty foods, such as wine or different milk types, but more research is needed to make that conclusion.
For the study, the researchers evaluated how sensory information and the presence of award labels affected consumer demand for two familiar (brie, cheddar) and two unfamiliar (Coulommiers, Cantal) varieties of artisanal cheeses in the U.S. A total of 488 artisanal cheese consumers from two regions – 270 from Corvallis, Oregon and 218 from Ithaca, New York – took part in the online study.
Participants were shown side-by-side images of two cheese varieties, with price information as well as some combination of an award sticker or sensory information about the cheese. An example of the sensory information, this for the Cantal: “A tangy and bold cheese with a crumbly, hard texture.”
The award sticker and sensory information were chosen because they are common and relatively low-cost promotional strategies that translate well to the online retail environment.
After being shown the images, participants were asked to select which cheese they preferred to purchase. They also had an option to make no purchase.
The researchers found participants fell into two broad groups:
The group that prefers unfamiliar foods, which made up about 44% of the total, look for cheeses not known to them and display a significantly higher willingness to pay for them. The researchers found that such consumers already are willing to pay a premium for less familiar varieties and an award sticker and sensory information further increase their willingness to pay.
Consumers who don’t appreciate unfamiliar varieties, who accounted for about 47% of the sample, respond especially well to sensory descriptions. In other words, sensory descriptions and food pairing suggestions could compensate for their hesitancy to pay for unfamiliar cheeses.
“I would say the biggest takeaway of the study for the industry is to think about what type of consumer you are trying to attract and to adjust your promotional plans to match what they are looking for,” said Streletskaya, whose research broadly looks at how food labeling impacts consumer demand.
Also a factor, she said, is that sensory descriptions can be costly, depending on the retail outlet, while award stickers can be more easily incorporated in the packaging design,
Co-authors of the paper are Sara Maruyama, Susan Queisser, Sherri Cole and Juyun Lim, of Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Science, and Alina Stelick of Cornell University.
The research was supported by an OSU Dairy Foods Innovation Fund.
How information leads consumers to select specialty foods when tasting is not an option
Lots to learn from the Norwegian Public Sector's IT success
There’s been no lack of scandals in the IT industry. When NAV, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, experienced difficulties in the middle of a major project, they changed their methods – and came up with a successful solution.
IMAGE: NAV, THE NORWEGIAN LABOUR AND WELFARE ADMINISTRATION, IS ON FACEBOOK, WHICH ALLOWS THE AGENCY TO QUICKLY ANSWER GENERIC QUESTIONS ABOUT BENEFITS. RECENTLY THE PUBLIC AGENCY CHANGED ITS WORKING METHOD IN THE MIDDLE OF IMPLEMENTING A NEW SOFTWARE SOLUTION FOR PAYING PARENTAL BENEFITS. NOW IT TAKES MERE SECONDS TO PROCESS AN APPLICATION FOR PARENTAL BENEFITS AND MOST CAN BE PROCESSED AUTOMATICALLY.view more
CREDIT: THE NORWEGIAN LABOUR AND WELFARE ADMINISTRATION
Major delays, costly overruns and severe dissatisfaction among users have often characterized the introduction of new software solutions.
The industry has been learning, but there’s still room for major improvements, says Torgeir Dingsøyr, a professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
He has studied what transpired when NAV (the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) changed its working method in the middle of implementing a new software solution for paying parental benefits.
From waterfall to evolution
The old Waterfall method in software development was a linear step-by-step process.
First, the project requirements were comprehensively defined, followed by major design and architecture choices, extensive testing, and finally – far down the line – delivery to the customer. Each step was dependent on the previous ones.
“The Waterfall method involves unnecessary waiting and great risk. The model’s sequential phases require the person handing off one phase to explain what happened to the next. Extensive documentation is often involved. Not an easy task. Experience shows that project staff working on different stages don't even sit together at lunch,” says Dingsøyr, who works at NTNU's Department of Computer Science.
“Even with extensive documentation, in practice the process can turn into a whispering game. The original message can be completely derailed,” he said.
Small groups
“Another well-known problem is that the IT team sits and waits for decisions in other parts of the organization. Today, the software industry has largely moved away from the Waterfall model towards the more flexible Agile methods,” says the professor.
Agile methods were developed as a response to what the industry experienced as a crisis in IT projects. Most people thought these methods only worked for small, co-located groups creating a small software product, but today they are also used in large IT projects.
NAV success
The professor thinks that most organizations today are working with what he calls first-generation large-scale agile methods for large IT projects.
When NAV started to create a computer system to simplify the processing of parental benefits in 2016, they chose a variant of the first-generation agile method.
In the middle of the project, despite a hard deadline, NAV switched over to the second-generation agile method.
The project was completed within both the deadline and budget – and to resounding success.
The processing time for applying for parental benefits was shortened from months to seconds, and 99.8 per cent of the applications were processed using self-service.
In 2019, NAV basked in the glory of being awarded the annual prize for digitalization in Norway.
Management – a support function
“In contrast to the first generation agile method, the second-generation version places the product at the centre right from the start. Work is carried out in cross-functional teams with much more freedom.”
Overlapping competence within the group means that clarification takes place continuously, instead of in large meetings that take up unnecessary time and resources.
“Less time is spent on administration and coordination, and more on product development. Management has to ensure that they set the direction for what the groups are to do – and that productivity is high. The management also becomes more of a support function for the professional work. The working groups are freed from the straitjacket of sequential phases,” Dingsøyr says.
Test immediately – learn as you go
Instead of working out a detailed and comprehensive requirement process with user participation at the beginning of a project, developers start with the most important things right away and let the users give immediate feedback, which has been found to be more effective.
“Not enough consideration has been given to user friendliness and the fact that it takes time to learn new systems. Early interaction with users can help the developers quickly understand what’s important about the system and what the customer really wants. This enables the developers to more effectively prioritize what should be included in terms of functionality,” Dingsøyr says.
“First you try a simple solution and then expand if necessary. Second-generation methods facilitate flexibility and learning along the way,” says Dingsøyr.
Effective coordinating between groups is key
Coordination is a challenge in large projects when several groups are working to create a computer system, and where there are many dependencies between the tasks.
The risk is that changes made by one person create unexpected problems for someone in another group. International studies show that work has stopped on projects where coordination between groups is problematic.
“The study of the Parental benefits project is important because it shows how the project managed to coordinate the work in a more efficient way with a second-generation method,” says Dingsøyr.
Avoid Big Bang launches!
The professor thinks it is a waste of time to wait for one big launch:
“A Big Bang launch is really risky. Technical problems can be difficult to detect before the system is deployed,” he says.
And for users, knowing what the new systems will be like is difficult before they see how the new system works in tandem with other systems they use.
It’s better to create something, test it straight away, present it – and perhaps even put it into operation before gradually launching it to more users.
The professor says that the streaming service Spotify has several groups working on functions for the app. New versions are first tested internally and then among several test users before they are released on a large scale.
“Thanks to cloud solutions, sending out new versions has become a lot easier, and different users can get different versions. We’re gaining completely different opportunities with the new technology and new methods.”
Others want to learn
Agile development methodologies are not only used by a number of large IT companies.
More and more industries are being digitized. Tesla thinks like a software company and has challenged the entire car industry. A modern car can have up to 100 million lines of software code.
“I’m seeing, for example, that Volvo Cars is adopting large-scale agile software development. Project management is showing great interest in what’s happened in the IT industry, as well as in fields such as management,” says Dingsøyr.
He believes that Norway and the other Nordic countries are leaders in software development methods. Several environments are now ripe for second-generation methods after many years of discussing software development practice.
“The study done on the Parental benefits project is the first to describe a transition to the second-generation large-scale agile development method while implementing a major IT project, and that shows how the transition led to more effective coordination practices,” says Dingsøyr.
A longitudinal explanatory case study of coordination in a very large development programme: the impact of transitioning from a first- to a second-generation large-scale agile development method
ARTICLE PUBLICATIO
Poetry and meditation power new research understanding - study
A new study reveals that ‘poetic meditation’ can enhance qualitative data analysis by offering researchers improved sensory experience and an ability to approach data analysis from unexpected directions.
The authors of the study explain that meditation allows researchers to train their body for data collection – improving their capacity to capture unexpected insights and deal with uncertainty and transformation as they incorporate novel interpretations into their research.
The skills enable researchers to understand novel cultural practices. Poetic meditations may prepare the researchers to see the world with different eyes.
Publishing their findings in Journal ofMarketing Management, researchers at the University of Birmingham and Kedge Business School, Bordeaux, France, outline a radical new process to help researchers to enhance their work.
Pilar Rojas-Gaviria, from the University of Birmingham, commented: “Scientific wonder prompts us to ask questions about the purpose of consumption, the way markets are created and extended, and how life and human experience are attached to both.
“Academics have always developed theses to resolve questions and explain events, but mindfulness practice can make our bodies an instrument of research – gathering data from different environmental sources. Poetry offers qualitative researchers a useful tool to refigure their surroundings and shed new light on the data they work with.”
Poetic meditation allows researchers to reveal unexpected or previously unnoticed features of market and consumption environments - rather than simply reproducing existing categories and theories.
By recording and presenting poetic meditations through audio media, the researchers demonstrate poetry’s potential to stimulate new ideas that can influence how academics approach data collection or analysis.
The researchers demonstrate the technique with two poetic meditations focusing on the colours green and red. These audio presentations settle the listener into a relaxed state, before taking the listener on an intellectual journey into poetry and philosophy, and ending with a period of meditation.
Robin Canniford, from Kedge Business School, commented: “We believe this technique can inspire researchers to include sound recordings and data presentations in their publications – creating a different approach to communicating and understanding their findings.
“Creating a poetic meditation might be a first step in a researcher’s journey that uncovers new sensations, interpretations, and questions - reaching towards unconventional and impactful responses in our research, even when answers seem to be far in the future.”
Poetry in marketing is already proven to be an effective research method to challenge conventional thinking in areas such as branding. It has helped marketers understand markets and consumers - engaging in conversations that capture how people consume products and services.
ENDS
For more information, please contact Tony Moran, International Communications Manager, on +44 (0)782 783 2312. For out-of-hours enquiries, please call +44 (0) 7789 921 165.
Notes for editors
The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 6,500 international students from over 150 countries
‘Poetic meditation: (re)presenting the mystery of the field’ by Pilar Rojas-Gaviria and Robin Canniford is published in Journal ofMarketing Management. The paper can be downloaded athttps://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2112611
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – Early retirement can accelerate cognitive decline among the elderly, according to research conducted by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Plamen Nikolov, assistant professor of economics, and Shahadath Hossain, a doctoral student in economics, both from Binghamton University, examined China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) and the Chinese Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) to determine how retirement plans affect cognitive performance among plan participants. CHARLS, a nationally representative survey of people ages 45 and above within the Chinese population, directly tests cognition with a focus on episodic memory and components of intact mental status.
With a higher life expectancy and a decline in fertility in developing countries, the elderly population has become the most significant demographic source in Asia and Latin America, generating an urgent need for new, sustainable pension systems. However, Nikolov’s research suggests that these retirement plans can have fortuitous downstream consequences. In a new study, Nikolov’s team shows that the access to retirement plans can play a significant role in explaining cognitive decline at older ages.
“Because of this large demographic boom, China introduced a formal pension program (called NRPS) in rural parts of the country. The program was introduced because of China’s rapidly rising aging population and in an effort to alleviate poverty in old age,” said Nikolov. “In rural parts of the country, traditional family-based care for the elderly had largely broken down, without adequate formal mechanisms to take its place. For the elderly, inadequate transfers from either informal family and community transfers could severely reduce their ability to cope with illness or poor nutrition.”
The researchers obtained administrative government data from the Chinese government on the implementation of the pension program. They obtained access to an additional survey data source, which detailed the behavior and socioeconomic characteristics of participants in the new retirement program. Nikolov and his research team discovered that the new program led to significant adverse effects on cognitive functioning among the elderly. The most significant indicator of cognitive decline was delayed recall, a measure widely implicated in neurobiological research as an important predictor of dementia. The pension program had more negative effects among females, and Nikolov said the results support the mental retirement hypothesis that decreased mental activity results in worsening cognitive skills.
While Nikolov and co-authors found that pension benefits and retirement lead to improved health, the program also induced a stark and much more negative influence on other dimensions: social activities, activities associated with mental fitness and social engagement.
“Participants in the program report substantially lower levels of social engagement, with significantly lower rates of volunteering and social interaction than non-beneficiaries. We find that increased social isolation is strongly linked with faster cognitive decline among the elderly. Interestingly, we found that the program improved some health behaviors. Program participants reported a reduced incidence of regular alcohol drinking compared to the previous year. Overall, the adverse effects of early retirement on mental and social engagement significantly outweigh the program’s protective effect on various health behaviors,” said Nikolov. “Or alternatively, the kinds of things that matter and determine better health might simply be very different from the kinds of things that matter for better cognition among the elderly. Social engagement and connectedness may simply be the single most powerful factors for cognitive performance in old age.”
Many policy decisions entail careful consideration of causes and effects. But understanding cause and effect in the context of economic or policy issues is often hampered because controlled experiments — such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) — might not always be practically or ethically possible. In such cases, "Economists often turn to a method called natural experiments," Nikolov explained. Natural experiments entail using random events or situations when real life mimics controlled experiments. Based on this method, Nikolov and his team studied how the decision to retire impacted cognition because the research team could compare how people of similar age and socioeconomic characteristics fared compared to similar individuals, but in areas where the pension program did not exist.
“Individuals in the areas that implement the NRPS score considerably lower than individuals who live in areas that do not offer the NRPS program,” Nikolov said. “Over the almost 10 years since its implementation, the program led to a decline in cognitive performance by as high as almost a fifth of a standard deviation on the memory measures we examine.”
Surprisingly, the estimated program impacts were similar to the negative findings regarding the same phenomenon but in higher income countries such as America, England and the European Union, which Nikolov said demonstrates that retirement affects people across different areas in more similar patterns than we previously understood.
“We were surprised to find that pension benefits and retirement actually resulted in reduced cognitive performance. In a different study, we found a very robust finding that the introduction of pension benefits and retirement led to positive health benefits via improvements in sleep and the reduction of alcohol consumption and smoking,” he said. “The fact that retirement led to reduced cognitive performance in and of itself is a stark finding about an unsuspected, puzzling issue, but a finding with extremely important welfare implications for one’s quality of life in old age.”
Nikolov said he hopes this research will help create new policies to improve the cognitive functioning of older generations during retirement.
“We hope our findings will influence how retirees view their retirement activities from a more holistic perspective and pay particular attention to their social engagement, active volunteering, and participating in activities fostering their mental acuity,” Nikolov said. “But we also hope to influence policymakers. We show robust evidence that retirement has important benefits. But it also has considerable costs. Cognitive impairments among the elderly, even if not severely debilitating, bring about a loss of quality of life and can have negative welfare consequences. Policymakers can introduce policies aimed at buffering the reduction of social engagement and mental activities. In this sense, retirement programs can generate positive spillovers for the health status of retirees without the associated negative effect on their cognition.”
Nikolov plans to continue research on this topic and examine how the introduction of pension benefits led to responses of labor force participation among the elderly in rural China.
