Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

The employment rate for workers 55 and over has been increasing across the world for the last two decades. This creates opportunities for employers to diversify their workforce and retain valuable knowledge and skills, while at the same time posing the challenges of rising labor costs and blocked opportunities for younger workers. This study summarizes the economic tradeoffs facing organizations as they design their optimal age structure, along with recent research on how older workers fit into organizations. Empirical studies show that whereas wage and benefit costs increase with age, there is no conclusive evidence that productivity increases as well. Studies using macroeconomic data find no evidence that older workers block opportunities for younger workers, whereas recent papers using a more disaggregated approach find mixed results. A key challenge facing older workers is the decline over the last 20 years in the odds of becoming a new hire. Although the turnover rate for older workers is much lower than for other age groups, employers have concerns about accommodating their work environment and work schedule preferences. Resume studies show age discrimination also plays a factor, especially for women. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research, including interindustry and international comparisons of microeconomic data on employment by age group and re-examining matched employee-employer data sets.

Governments face a potential trade-off between provision for the population in retirement and the support of working-age households with low income. Using EUROMOD-based microdata from 28 countries, we quantify public redistribution to pensioner- and working-age households, distinguishing also by income quartiles. In general, Northern European countries are characterized by a low net redistribution between households, limited public pensions, but a strong support of low-income households. By contrast, most Southern European countries are characterized by a high net redistribution to pensioners, offering generous benefits to some, but little support for working age households with low income. Our results show that a strong public net redistribution between households is associated with generous public benefits for a portion of the retirees, but negatively related to support for the population with low income.

A large literature has reopened the secular stagnation hypothesis, first proposed near the end of the great depression as a warning for anemic growth resulting from long run trends in population aging. In this paper, I explore the relationship between population age structure and growth in: investment, consumption and output, in a long run panel of advanced economies. The evidence is largely consistent with proposed channels for secular stagnation. Investment growth, in its level and as a fraction of GDP, appears much stronger in young populations, while facing demographic headwinds in older economies. Consumption and output growth are positively associated with late career workers, with a negative relationship coming from both young and old dependents. Consistent with the recent secular stagnation literature, interest rate channels appear to have strong interactions with population age structures. I find that for investment and output growth, estimated impacts of age-structure are more pronounced in low interest rate environments, with high rates mitigating some of their effect.

We argue that if the United States wants to make delayed retirement a healthy reality in the future, policymakers must level the social and economic playing field for young and middle-aged workers. As it stands, precarious working conditions, family caregiving responsibilities, poor health, and age discrimination make it difficult or impossible for many to work into their late 60s and beyond. Investments in better jobs today could lead to more secure retirements tomorrow. At the same time, we need a renovation of America’s retirement and disability systems to provide financial security for all Americans as they age. Our findings suggest that working longer is set in motion long before one’s 60s; it is structured by a life course history of working steadily through one’s 50s. We argue that policies affecting work and policies affecting retirement are two sides of the same coin and must be considered together.

Since individuals are increasingly required to manage their own retirement portfolios, policy levers that increase retirement planning and saving have become increasingly important. We use variation in timing and presence of state-required personal finance coursework in high schools to estimate the effect of the financial education coursework on the likelihood of holding and amount in retirement accounts in adulthood (ages 25–40). Our results show no definitive increases in account ownership, non-retirement investment accounts, or homeownership. Since prior work finds required high school financial education improves credit and debt outcomes, we recommend that states and educators prioritize content that is more immediately relevant for 18-year-olds, such as budgeting, long-term debt, and credit.

Global life expectancy now stands at 71 years compared with 30 years in 1870. This fact increases the need to understand how we age and how that impacts our economic decision making. It also raises the issue of how we should change our life cycle behaviours, policies and institutions to adapt to these longer lives. The combination of these two factors leads to a very different focus from the traditional interest of an ageing society and its focus on changes in the age distribution of society. It emphasises the need to understand a longevity society and changes in how we age. Given the importance of intertemporal decision making and the life cycle model in economics the implications of longevity for economic research offers rich pickings across a range of areas covering health, human capital, employment, financial decisions and macroeconomics. Understanding the changes in how we age in response to longer lives and identifying the channels to ensure that longer lives are welfare enhancing should be a fruitful and important area for research.

In 2019, the United States of America National Academy of Medicine (NAM) charged an international, independent, and multidisciplinary commission with the development of a consensus report: “The Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity,” to assess the challenges presented by population ageing and make evidence-based recommendations for how these challenges can be translated into opportunities for societies globally. In this paper, we highlight these recommendations, and show how they can generate a virtuous cycle, starting with a whole-of-society investment in key enablers, especially social infrastructure, the physical environment, health systems, work and volunteerism opportunities, and lifelong learning and retraining, with social cohesion, equity, and a strong social compact at the centre, resulting in populations having good health throughout their life course, triggering a longevity dividend from untapped human, social and economic capital as life spans increase.

Recent research has uncovered systematic variation in preferences over the life cycle. While most of the research has been devoted to decomposing the effects of age from influences related to cohort membership and time, the role of longevity is still not fully understood. Here, I provide some first evidence for the distinct effects of chronological age, of prospective age in terms of statistical life expectancy, and of subjective expectations about the length of life, for risk preferences and trust among the elderly.

Australian regulations strictly limit early withdrawals from retirement plan accounts. However, in 2020, the Government made otherwise illiquid plan balances temporarily liquid, offering emergency relief during the pandemic. The COVID-19 Early Release Scheme allowed participants in financial hardship easy access to up to $A20,000 of savings over two rounds. We use administrative and survey data from a large retirement plan to describe how and why participants withdrew savings under the scheme. A majority report that they needed the money immediately but around one quarter said they anticipated future needs. Most thought about the decision for less than a week, acted soon after each round opened, and withdrew as much as they could. Many people did not estimate, or appear to have mis-estimated, the impact the withdrawal could have on their retirement savings. Our findings offer insights into preferences for liquidity. They also raise questions about whether the features of the early release scheme, and their implied endorsement by the Government, influenced some withdrawers more than personal deliberations over financial welfare.

This paper analyses economic implications of the different ways in which the population structure of countries becomes older: longer lives and declines in fertility both generate ageing populations but have very different impacts upon the aggregate population. If lower fertility persists populations in many countries will decline. Having reviewed the evidence for this, I consider both why fertility rates have fallen and may stay low. I then analyse the economic implications of populations that may stop growing and start to fall, focusing on how this may play out in the UK. I consider policy implications of such a demographic shift. Despite many predictions of the dire consequences of falling populations the economic impacts are likely, on balance, to be positive.