Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

Aging populations exert upwards pressure on healthcare systems, raising concerns about increasing expenditures on health. This paper reviews the empirical literature on the issue and critically assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the outcomes measured, methodologies used, and the hypotheses tested. While age strongly predicts long-term care expenditure, the time-to-death factor renders the aging effect null for hospital care expenditure. Existing literature disagrees on the importance of age and time-to-death effects on prescription drug and ambulatory care costs. Morbidity and medical innovation mediate these effects, proving crucial for aging-related healthcare expenditure growth. We identify several opportunities for future research including gender differences, utilization of emerging methods, and the importance of institutional settings.

The intergenerational transfer of resources is gaining importance across countries facing population ageing. This paper investigates the economic and budgetary consequences of ageing in the Slovak Republic, which is projected to be one of the fastest ageing polities of the European Union. Using dependency and support indicators derived from the National Transfer Accounts, the quantitative analysis shows how this demographic development impacts aggregate labour income, consumption, taxes and public and private transfers. For instance, the transfer weighted public sector dependency ratio increases by 117 %, from 1.12 in 2015 to 2.43 in 2060. While increasing the retirement age may dampen the negative economic effect of demographic ageing, it cannot resolve the ensuing imbalance in labour income and consumption on its own. Moreover, the potential positive effect of higher fertility is preceded by an increase in consumption by the economically inactive Youth, which results in a deteriorating balance of private transfers. This trade-off is often overlooked in the scholarly debate. A combination of measures composed of increased labour productivity and lower consumption appears the most likely solution to the problem of growing imbalance between aggregate labour income and consumption.

This paper uses long-term population projections to study the evolution of dementia in Luxembourg through 2070, as well as its impact on public expenditure through healthcare and long-term care. We extend a standard micro-simulation model on health outcomes by adding an algorithm to identify individuals suffering from dementia. This allows us to simulate dementia prevalence among individuals aged 50 and more in several scenarios incorporating alternative hypotheses about risk factors, new treatments and comorbidities (including long-run effects of COVID-19). Public health policies reducing stroke and hypertension risk could lower dementia prevalence by 17% and public expenditure on healthcare for dementia patients by a similar amount. A new treatment extending the mild dementia phase could nearly double prevalence and possibly triple the associated healthcare costs. Finally, past exposure to COVID-19 could raise prevalence by 12% to 24% in the medium term and public expenditure on dementia healthcare by 6% to 12%. Public expenditure on long-term care for dementia patients would increase even more, generally doubling by 2070.

The balance between maintaining and enhancing the health, quality of life, and healthy life expectancy of the elderly and their corresponding social costs, including medical and long-term care expenses, is an important policy issue in the context of Japan’s super-aging society. In this paper, we employ individual panel data from the four waves of the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement to examine how retirement from the labor market affects the health of elderly males. Numerous empirical studies have shown mixed results concerning the causal effect of retirement on health through diverse and complex mechanisms. However, we present several new insights by focusing on the policy change in 2000 of raising the pensionable age for the earnings-related public pension system which completely eliminates pension income after the statutory retirement age for particular cohorts. Our fixed-effects instrumental variable estimation shows that retirement significantly improves oral function and mental health, but it also makes male retirees more susceptible to lifestyle-related diseases. Supplemental results further suggest that a significant increase in dental care utilization would help improve post-retirement oral function.

I investigate the links between the part-time employment opportunities and the labour supply adjustments of older workers, focusing on both the extensive and intensive margins. Utilising data for 30 European countries in the period from 2011 to 2021, I construct a quasi-panel that compares individuals aged 60–64 with those aged 55–59 from five years prior. I find that the employees in sectors offering more part-time jobs are more likely to stay in employment, and that the total hours worked by these employees decrease at a slower rate than those of the employees in sectors imposing more rigid hours constraints. These results are most pronounced for women in manual types of occupation, but are significant across almost all examined worker categories. The positive relationship between the part-time employment opportunities and the total hours worked of older employees is robust to various modifications in the empirical setup. However, this relationship is heterogeneous across countries, and is least pronounced in the countries with a high availability of part-time jobs.

This paper develops an overlapping generations model with intergenerational transfer of time in the form of grandparenting and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. The introduction of time transfer allows taking into account child care responsibilities. Under the situation of population ageing, a fall in the fertility rate leads to not only a reduction in contributions to the pension system but also lower childcare responsibilities that increase life-cycle income. Hence, the impacts of demographic changes on old labour decisions and pensions need to be re-examined. I find that in countries with low fertility rates and small pension systems, a fall in fertility rate reduces working time in old age. Consequently, population ageing due to a lower fertility rate always decreases pensions. On the other hand, for countries with high fertility rates and countries with low fertility rates but large pension systems, a decrease in fertility rate reduces retirement age. In these countries, pensions will increase if retirement is elastic to changes in fertility. In all cases, longer life expectancy increases pensions if retirement is relatively inelastic to changes in longevity.

We investigate the potential dynamics in the effect of retirement, on food-at-home purchases and dietary quality in Denmark. We combine Home-scan data with nutritional information and administrative data on retirement, income and health status. The panel contains 497 retiring and 1,471 control households. We estimate the effect of retirement up to 10 years after the date of retirement by using Fixed Effects with health and wealth proxies, as well as Fixed Effects IV with the ages eligible for retirement as instruments to control for the potential endogeneity of retirement. Based on the Fixed effects results we find that overall dietary quality increase slightly at retirement, but find only minor and mostly insignificant changes in the individual components of the diet. The effects are found to be of the same magnitude, but insignificant in the FE-IV estimation. Hence, there seem to be a small increase in dietary health upon retirement in Denmark. The results for food expenditure and energy consumption are ambiguous. Based on the FE with proxy variables we find indications of long-run adjustments in food expenditures, while energy consumption is immediately affected by retirement, but has no further adjustment. Both effects are insignificant in the FE-IV estimation. The very small changes observed, suggest that dietary behaviour might be governed by habitual behaviour and might also be due to the high income replacement rate at retirement in Denmark.

The global shifts in population age distribution brings about both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, demographic transitions present an opportunity for sustained economic growth. However, it also poses challenges in meeting future consumption requirements. In this paper, we performed an index decomposition analysis linked with an economic-demographic model to trace how population age structure change may affect household electricity demand with the Philippines as a specific case study. Our results show that population ageing has a direct, significant, and persistent effect on residential electricity demand growth. In economies like the Philippines where the elderly consumes more electricity per person relative to younger cohorts, population ageing is expected to raise aggregate electricity demand through sheer compositional accounting effect. But even in economies where average electricity consumption is flat or declining in age, demographic dividends are projected to raise aggregate electricity consumption by expanding electricity access and increasing usage intensity across all age groups through a positive income effect. The permanence and irreversibility of population ageing, and the persistence of economic growth from demographic change may drive continuing growth in the energy sector.

Using a life-cycle model and a representative sample of households, we analyze the extent to which using home equity leads to (heterogeneity in) welfare gains over the life cycle. The most policy-feasible option to borrow against 50% of home equity over the life cycle leads to median (average) welfare gains of 7% (11%). However, we find substantial heterogeneity with half of the households facing a welfare gain between 3% and 13%. Much of this heterogeneity is explained by heterogeneity in households’ income and (housing) wealth and less so by heterogeneity in their demographics or preferences for consumption smoothing and time.

This paper investigates how crossing the normal pension eligibility age affects retirement status and healthcare utilization by using the exogenous rule for the public pension benefit and a dataset for the elderly population from South Korea — one of the high-income Asian countries. To overcome selection bias, I rely on a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to compare the outcomes of those barely above and below eligibility age thresholds. By using aggregate measures of healthcare utilization, I find that retirement increases inpatient care utilization, while it has a negative but statistically insignificant effect on outpatient care utilization. These results are qualitatively consistent with the existing evidence in the developing country documenting that retirement positively impacts inpatient care utilization.