Cognitive Economics Study

The Cognitive Economics Study (CogEcon) is designed to help understand the cognitive bases of economic decisionmaking. This effort was made possible through a partnership with the "Cognition and Aging in the USA" study (CogUSA), which is part of the Unified Studies of Cognition (CogUSC) led by cognitive psychologist Jack McArdle at the University of Southern California.

The Cognitive Economics Study has fielded three waves and a fourth wave is planned for Summer 2013. The first wave, CogEcon 2008, collected information about income, work, assets and debts, financial sophistication, use of financial advice, among other topics. The second wave, CogEcon 2009, repeated many questions from CogEcon 2008 and contained new questions about changes during and responses to the financial crisis that started in late 2008. We are currently processing data from the third wave, CogEcon 2011.

CogEcon public use data can be merged with cognitive and demographic variables collected by CogUSA. Please see Section I.A.4. of the Data Documentation listed below for information about accessing the CogUSA data, and the CogUSC website has more information about the study.

Documentation

These documents provide background information about the CogEcon 2008 and CogEcon 2009 surveys and should provide sufficient information for researchers to successfully use the CogEcon public use data files. To save a document, right-click the link and choose "Save Link As..."

• Survey Design: (pdf) Describes survey development and methodology, including details about the sample.
• CogEcon 2008 Questions: (pdf) Shows all questions from CogEcon 2008.
• CogEcon 2009 Questions: (pdf) Shows all questions from CogEcon 2009.
• Compact Codebook: (pdf) Lists variable name, label and summary statistics.
• Data Documentation: (pdf) Describes how to access and use the CogEcon public release datasets. This includes details about variable naming conventions and idiosyncrasies between mode (web and mail) and across waves, and an explanation of the Conditions of Use agreement.
• Codebook: (pdf) Full codebook from Stata.

CogEcon Public Data

The CogEcon public release data are available through the Health and Retirement Study's data distribution system. Please see the Data page for more information about accessing CogEcon data.

E-mail [cogecon AT isr DOT umich DOT edu] with questions or concerns.