Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

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.

We analyze optimal social security in an overlapping generations model with demographic change and endogenous retirement. Households choose to spend the second period of their lives in full retirement if the tax rate on labor income exceeds a threshold. This threshold is increasing in life expectancy and decreasing in the fertility rate, which implies that both types of demographic change increase the relevance of the partial retirement case: both an increase in life expectancy and a drop in fertility imply that retirement is delayed. We also show that when the government decides about retirement, the command optimum can be replicated through social security policies if the laissez-faire equilibrium features capital overaccumulation. When households decide about their retirement themselves, however, replication of the command optimum is not possible. In both cases, it is optimal to expand social security when longevity increases and to reduce it when fertility drops.

We examine the association between social determinants of health (SDoH) and the health of older adults in three countries experiencing rapid economic growth: Brazil, India, and China. We assessed health using frailty, the vulnerability to poor recovery after a physiologic stressor. We created a frailty index with data from three health and retirement surveys: the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging wave 1 (2015–2016), the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey wave 3 (2015–2016), and the Longitudinal Aging Study in India wave 1 (2017–2019). SDoH measures included within-country income and wealth deciles, education level, and rural residence. We analyzed data using beta regression, first within country, then with merged data with interactions between country and each SDoH, and finally with the merged analysis stratified by age. Both within country and with merged data, education was consistently the SDoH most strongly and significantly associated with frailty, with higher education tied to lower frailty. These associations attenuated with greater age. We show first that education has associations with health into older age and second the value of cross-national comparisons for understanding drivers of the health of older adults.

This paper examines the impact of aging and related socio-economic trends (educational expansion and changes in family structure) on the sustainability of public and private transfers. For this purpose, recently available disaggregated National Transfer Accounts (NTA) are combined with dynamic microsimulation techniques to build the first dynamic microsimulation model that incorporates NTA accounting (microWELT) and is thus able to capture how agents rely on public and private transfers over their lifecycle. The model simulates the major lifetime transitions at the individual level, including education, emancipation, fertility, partnership formation and dissolution, and death. The analysis was conducted for four European countries, representative of four welfare models: Austria, Finland, Spain, and the UK. We compare sustainability indicators for the economy, the public sector, and families in the NTA tradition with enriched indicators that capture additional composition effects. When these additional composition effects are ignored, as in previous literature, we find that the Economic Support Ratio decreases more than the pure Demographic Support Ratio. In striking contrast, we show that composition effects due to educational expansion that interact with changes in family structures lead to the opposite result, alleviating the effects of demographic aging. Unlike public transfers, private transfers are only slightly affected by aging, as they are near zero for the elderly.

The share of older adults residing in a nursing home is much higher in the Netherlands and Denmark than in the US, while in the US, perhaps surprisingly, individuals are much more likely to be admitted to a nursing home. We explore reasons for the higher US admission rates and aim to understand to what extent these differences are due to (i) differences in the composition of the population aged 65+ or (ii) differences in LTC system features.

We use data from HRS and SHARE merged to administrative data to compare total nursing home admission rates and long-term nursing home admission rates in The Netherlands (N = 1,800) and Denmark (N = 1,859), with comparable rates from the US (N = 6,553). We use decomposition techniques to quantify the differences in determinants of nursing home admissions.

We find that elders in the US are more likely to be disabled, but even after adjusting for disability, they are more likely to be admitted to a nursing home. Because nearly half of these stays in the US are for fewer than 20 days, there is a shorter average length of stay; by contrast in the Netherlands and Denmark nursing home admissions are generally much longer term. These findings indicate that nursing home admissions are not solely determined by personal characteristics; also system and cultural differences are important reasons why nursing home use varies across countries.

This paper analyzes the impact of widowhood on the health of mid-aged and older individuals in China using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data. Our results show that widowhood significantly increases the risk of depression, chronic diseases, and body pain while reducing cognitive function, sleeping time, and daily activity functions. The effects on depression and daily functions are immediate, that on chronic diseases is lagged, and the effects on cognitive function and sleeping hours persist over time. We find that rural widows are particularly vulnerable to negative health outcomes due to their weaker economic positions, for whom widowhood leads to more grandchild care responsibility and corresponding workforce and social withdrawals. Moreover, rural widows’ income loss is not compensated by children, either by co-residence or financial transfers, leading to reduced living standards. Overall, our findings suggest that China needs to strengthen economic security for older people, especially among rural women, in order to avoid significant negative consequences of widowhood.