Background. As the population ages, a greater demand for long-term care services and, in particular, nursing homes is expected. Policy analysts continue to search for alternative, less costly forms of care for the elderly and have attempted to develop programs to delay or prevent nursing-home entry. Health care administrators require information for planning the future demand for nursing-home services. This study assesses the relative importance of predisposing, enabling, and need characteristics in predicting and understanding nursing-home entry.

There is widespread interest in disparities in health status across income groups and other classifications of socioeconomic status. In Canada, as in many other countries, there is considerable evidence showing such disparities. This study reports an analysis of male mortality at ages 65 to 74 in relation to socioeconomic characteristics, specifically employment and self-employment earnings histories during the 10 to 20 years prior to age 65, marital status, disability, and age at retirement. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Canada Pension Plan covering more than 500,000 individuals. Significant mortality gradients are found throughout the earnings spectrum. These gradients are also clearly evident in a multivariate context. The results illustrate the major potential of administrative data for research. Substantively, the results cast doubt on the primacy of causal explanations such as "reverse causality" and "health selection" and raise important questions regarding pension and health policy.

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The findings emphasize the importance of incorporating measures of disability in health services research. Both the severity of disability and the number of chronic conditions had independent value in predicting health care utilization. This has important implications for data collection and for the allocation of health care resources for research, which has traditionally been targeted toward fatal chronic conditions.

Summary Overall, only a small proportion of geographic‐specific production (for the selected commodities) are in areas that are highly specialized in that commodity. The large proportion of production in nonspecialized regions suggests that other production opportunities do exist. Thus, a “decoupled” agricultural policy would not necessarily mean that producers receiving a decoupled “government payment would be constrained by geographic factors to continue their original production pattern. We recognize, however, that others may wish to select different commodity groups when analyzing the availability of production alternatives. We suggest that census data do provide one way for determining the extent to which a decoupled” agricultural policy may in effect lock in the existing production pattern.