Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

Fertility rates have been falling persistently over the past 50 years in most rich countries. Simultaneously, the trend of outward migration from poorer to richer countries has been steady. These two forces contributed to population aging, and – in an increasing number of countries – even to population decline. In this paper, we quantify the effect of decreasing fertility on the aggregate human capital stock. In doing so we take into account that parents with fewer children may raise investments in their children’s education and health. We find that the human capital impact of declining fertility is partly compensated through such responses when including the full set of countries in our regressions. For the subset of countries that experience population decline, the compensatory effect is weaker and, in many specifications, even insignificant.

National Transfer Accounts (NTAs) provide insights into the effects of ageing on various forms of intergenerational transfers. When these accounts are disaggregated by socioeconomic status (SES) and calculated for at least two different time periods, they offer a powerful tool for understanding changes in economic inequality across age groups and over time. This paper illustrates the application of some standard distributional analysis tools using NTAs, specifically focusing on the case of Peru for 2007 and 2019. The main findings suggest that younger individuals have been the relative “winners” from Peru’s sustained economic growth over the past two decades. Additionally, the equalizing power of tertiary education has increased during this period, i.e., a greater prevalence of tertiary education reduces inequality. However, a concerning observation is the deterioration of living conditions among older and less educated individuals.

There has been extensive research on the importance of saving for retirement and on tools to support the accumulation of retirement wealth. Much less attention has been paid to the decumulation phase, that is, the spending down of wealth following retirement. Understanding the decumulation phase requires information about the spending patterns of older households and how those patterns evolve with age. This study uses comprehensive longitudinal data on total household spending from a survey that is representative of the older U.S. population to estimate the trajectories of spending after age 65. Based on data spanning the period 2005–2019, real spending declined for both single and coupled households after age 65 at annual rates of about 1.7 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively. Stratification by wealth holdings observed at or closely following age 65 showed sizeable variation in spending levels by wealth quartile, but little variation in rates of change in spending. The fact that spending declines broadly, including among those in the highest wealth quartile, suggests that the decline may not be related to economic position. This view is supported by an analysis of budget shares which show increases with age in the budget share for gifts and donations which suggests that economic position on average does not deteriorate with age, even as spending declines.

This study examines the impact of informal care provision for older parents on carer’s health and labour market outcomes in England. I evaluate the validity of previously used instrumental variables for care provision. The results suggest that concerns about the validity of these instruments can be partly mitigated by considering variation in the timing rather than the incidence of informal care provision. Effects of informal care provision on health are positive for men and mostly insignificant for women. Informal care provision leads to a reduction in working hours for women, but does not affect labour force participation or labour income.

Growing life expectancy and a rising proportion of older people make the issue of whether cohorts are ageing better a key individual, social and economic issue. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing we characterise how frailty develops with age, how this differs across demographic groups, whether more recent cohorts are ageing better and what the key areas of focus for health policy should be. We find cohort effects such that frailty at each age has been decreasing over time but that this trend shows modest signs of slowing and is less pronounced for those with lower wealth. Improvements across cohorts reflect improvements in ADLs, cognitive function, and mobility but limited progress in reducing the incidence of diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. We find mobility and ADLs the main driver of average differences across regions but cross-regional differences are driven more by within than between group inequality.

We show heterogenous displacement effects of mandatory occupational pension savings on private household wealth for different groups. Richer households in particular show larger displacements. This contributes to explaining why empirical studies often come with different estimates of this effect. We study the case of the Netherlands, where wage employed and self-employed workers are differently exposed to compulsory pension savings, and the institutional setting provides exogenous variation in pension wealth that can be used as instrument in the analysis. We use rich administrative data on (pension) wealth and income combined for the first time to supervisory data of pension funds. Our results show a displacement effect of −37% for wage employed and of −61% to −77% for self-employed people. The higher displacement effect we find for the self-employed might be explained by the fact that self-employed workers are arguably more aware of their pension accrual, or lack thereof, because there is no employer who organizes and (partly) pays this for them.

Benchmark replacement rates are commonly used to set up saving plans or to assess retirement preparedness. An open question is whether high earners need the same replacement rate as low earners. In this paper, I apply the GAESE framework, an approach known from the equivalence scale literature, to assess how the replacement rate that maintains income satisfaction through retirement relates to income levels. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, and applying fixed-effects ordered logit models, I find that the benchmark replacement rate decreases with income. For singles, this finding is consistent across many modifications of the approach, whereas for couples the finding is sensitive to the composition of the retiree household, i.e. whether or not the retiree’s partner is still employed.

This article examines the impact of a law change in benefit rules on the exit of older workers out of the unemployment benefits system. This change occurred in Spain in July 2012, when the age to become eligible for an unlimited unemployment assistance benefit was raised from 52 to 55, reducing the entitlement period to three years for the group of individuals aged 52–54 years who exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits, providing an ideal setting for a quasi-experimental evaluation. Using data from the Spanish Public Employment Service and the recipients aged 55–57 as a control group, we find that the probability of exiting from unemployment to a job for treated individuals who stopped having access to those benefits after the policy change took place increased substantially, thus reducing the expected duration of benefits recipiency. The estimated fiscal impact of this law change was a saving of around €600 million on the benefits budget.

Developed countries are seeing advances in automation and, at the same time, their populations are aging. In this paper we examine both phenomena using the delay in retirement age as a nexus. Although automation is freeing workers from repetitive, hard work, older workers feel threatened by new automation advances which generate skill mismatches. Two links are highlighted: First, since skill mismatches affect low-skilled older workers more than those who are highly skilled, the latter will remain active for a longer period of time while the former will be pushed to retire. Second, the highly skilled workers who decide to prolong their working lives are a valuable resource for further automation advances because this technology continues to need human-assisted solutions. Our analysis establishes an important role for adult training to fill the gap between initial education and the demands of a rapidly changing labor market in order to encourage individuals to postpone their retirement and, hence, to ensure the sustainability of the social insurance system.

The existing literature on fiscal unsustainability in the United States often evaluates three alternative policies: increasing the payroll tax rate, reducing pension benefits, and extending the retirement age. Studies suggest that reducing the replacement rate and increasing the retirement age provide higher welfare for future generations. However, these studies often assume constant risk aversion (CRA), which contradicts the empirical evidence that suggests risk aversion tends to increase with age. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of risk aversion, life-cycle behavior, and welfare under uncertainties, this study integrates age-dependent increasing risk aversion (IRA) into an overlapping generations model with risk-sensitive preferences. The quantitative analysis shows that individuals who exhibit IRA tend to adjust hours worked to reduce income risk and accumulate more precautionary savings to ensure future consumption. However, reducing uncertainty consumes resources that could otherwise have been used to increase overall consumption and leisure. Individuals who expect to become more risk averse in old age may prefer an increase in the payroll tax rate over the other two options, as the latter would result in relatively higher uncertainty.