James Banks is professor of economics at the University of Manchester and deputy research director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where he also directs the Centre for Economic Research on Ageing. His research focuses on empirical modeling of individual economic behavior over the life cycle, with particular focus on consumption and spending patterns, saving and asset accumulation, housing dynamics, and retirement and pension choices. Recent work has also begun to look at broader issues in the economics of aging, such as health, physical, and cognitive functioning and their association with labor market status; the dynamics of work disability; and the nature of expectations of retirement, health, and longevity. He is also coprincipal investigator of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and has become actively involved in designing economic measures for survey data. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from University College London.

Magali Barbieri has a joint position as an associate researcher at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED) in Paris, France, and at the Department of Demography, University of California, Berkeley, where she is in charge of coordinating the Human Mortality Database project. She conducts research on a wide range of topics, including infant and child mortality in both developed and developing countries; changes in the structure of mortality by cause over time and across countries; and health in colonial Vietnam. Her most recent publications in English include a coedited volume on changes in the Vietnamese family after 20 years of socioeconomic reforms; a long coauthored article on 50 years of demographic trends in East and Southeast Asia; and an article on the mortality consequences of the 2003 heat wave in France.

Lisa F. Berkman is director, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy, Epidemiology and Population and International Health within the Harvard School of Public Health. She is a social epidemiologist whose work is oriented toward understanding social inequalities in health and aging related to socioeconomic status, labor policy, and social networks and social isolation. She has recently started research on labor issues related to job design and flexibility. The majority of her work is devoted to identifying the role of social networks and support in predicting declines in physical and cognitive functioning, onset of disease, and mortality, especially related to cardiovascular or cerebrovascular disease. She has a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Carl Boe is research demographer with the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on stochastic forecasting of mortality and population, biodemogra-