Harmonizing measures of cross-country policies for aging research: Applications to education, pension, and long-term care systems

Objectives: Decisions over the life course, such as stopping school, retiring, or receiving care, are shaped by public policies and have profound implications for health and aging. Yet, studying the impact of these policies is hampered by a lack of standardized and harmonized policy data, making peer review and validation difficult. The Gateway to Global Aging Data addresses these barriers by collecting, harmonizing, and documenting policies over time on education, retirement, and long-term care systems, enabling linkages to longitudinal data from international aging cohorts, thus accelerating research on health and aging. Methods: Policies are collected using a strict protocol, documented using a common terminology, reviewed by country experts, and made publicly available. Subsequently, policy measures are linked based on individual characteristics in the international network of health and retirement studies and used to highlight cross-country differences in behavioral responses. Results: Application of the harmonized measures demonstrates that policies influence behavior. This is evidenced by changes in years of schooling through compulsory schooling and educational tracking laws, the timing of retirement through legislation on state pension age, and the use of formal care through legislation on eligibility rules for publicly funded long-term care benefits. Discussion: Harmonized data on public policies enable research on how changes caused by policymakers shape human behavior and, ultimately, health outcomes. These data can be linked to surveys across the world. The Gateway Policy Explorer’s tools enable accountable and robust policy research on the causal impacts of health and aging policies.