Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women’s knowledge and awareness of their future pension status and interest for pension information. We interview a representative sample of 801 Italian working women to assess their knowledge about pensions, financial issues and their own savings. The responses show that their knowledge and awareness of retirement planning is limited. We then run a randomized experiment to evaluate the effect of increased information regarding pensions on women’s awareness, knowledge, and behaviors. Women in the treated group are provided information in the form of three short online tutorials. A follow-up survey shows that these women become more interested and aware of pension schemes and retirement options after completing the tutorials and are more likely to be better informed and keener to obtain further information. When looking at changes in behavior, we find that treated women who are closer to retirement are more likely to believe that they would make different work-life decisions if they received specific pension information in a timely fashion. Middle-aged women are also more likely to have a supplementary pension fund if they are concerned about their standards of living after retirement.

The employment rates of older men have risen dramatically since the mid-1990s in a number of developed economies. Nevertheless, the employment rates of men aged 55–64 in many OECD countries remain at or below the levels observed in the mid-1970s, despite substantial improvements in health and longevity. In this review I summarize some of the driving forces behind the dramatic changes in older men’s employment over the last several decades and discuss the role for retirement reform to further boost employment in the future.

Objectives

Estimating the fiscal consequences of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) on patients and informal carers using a UK public economic perspective.

Methods

A simulated cohort of 1,000 pairs of people with AD and informal carers was compared with 1,000 demographically identical pairs in the general population. Both cohorts enter the model at the mean age of mild cognitive impairment onset. Time to AD onset was based on the literature and AD progression was modelled using published equations and a state-transition microsimulation. Labour participation, financial support, and paid taxes were linked to cognitive decline and caregiving needs using UK labour statistics and tax rates. Healthcare costs were based on published literature. Future costs and life-years were discounted at 3.5%. Results were reported as incremental differences in total tax revenue, financial support, and healthcare costs, over the AD continuum, between cohorts affected and unaffected by AD.

Results

Each AD-affected pair was associated with estimated incremental fiscal losses of £73,749 to the UK government. Financial support and healthcare costs were responsible for 59.3% and 22.2% of AD’s fiscal burden, respectively. Total lost tax revenue due to PwAD and carers’ reduced earnings represented 18.5% of total government losses. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the results. Assuming mild cognitive impairment onset at age 60 let to incremental fiscal losses of £141,323 per AD-affected pair. Fiscal costs for entire UK population with AD were predicted to be £16 billion annually.

Conclusions

Alzheimer’s disease strongly impacts UK’s public economy and should be considered to inform healthcare policymaking.

Using data on stated preferences on the decumulation of pension wealth after retirement, we estimate a stylized structural life-cycle model incorporating several behavioural features. In the stated choice questions, pension income is in the form of a constant annuity, a “high-low” annuity that falls from a higher to a lower level five years into retirement, or a “low-high” annuity that does the reverse. This creates variation in liquid and illiquid wealth. Respondents are asked to choose among several expenditure patterns in the first ten years after retirement. We find that the respondents do not behave in the way the standard life-cycle model would predict. They respond to the variation in how they receive their income have a tendency to follow the rule of thumb of going for the middle choice alternative. Moreover, they value illiquid wealth much less than liquid wealth at the ten years time horizon.

Demographic shifts in population age pyramids mean that older adults now outnumber young people in many developed nations. Poor health associated with older age presents significant challenges to individuals and societies, not least in spiralling health care costs. Advances in scientific understanding of biological processes that change with age have led to the identification of core hallmarks of ageing, including cell senescence and dysregulated nutrient sensing, that represent new therapeutic targets. Drugs developed to target these hallmarks, such as senolytic and senomodifying agents as well as mTOR inhibitors, have been shown to improve later life health in experimental models. Results from early-stage clinical trials suggest that these therapeutic approaches will be applicable to ageing humans, with significant potential to improve later life health. Investments into effective biomedical interventions targeted to ageing processes are likely to give very high yields, especially since clinical adoption of treatments for (or even prevention of) age-related diseases is possible within the next decade.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chilean Congress approved three laws between July 2020 and April 2021 that allowed early withdrawals of pension funds without any eligibility constraints. In this paper, we use nationwide survey data to examine the factors associated with people’s assessments about the suitability of these policies in the context of the pandemic, with a particular focus on trust and political ideology. We find that respondents that declare high levels of trust in Chile’s pension system, financial system, and political institutions and actors tend to oppose early withdrawal policies. Similarly, respondents on the right of the political spectrum and those that voted for the incumbent president, who opposed this policy, also declare opposition to early withdrawals. Overall, our findings suggest that political attitudes and beliefs are associated with policy views on changes to Chile’s pension-fund system and that support for early withdrawal policies may be driven by lack of confidence in institutions.

Affordable access to health care was a challenge for the elderly in Ghana until the introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme in 2003, where the elderly were exempted from premium payments. The study employs household-level data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey to investigate whether exempting the elderly from health insurance premium payments affects healthcare utilisation and labour market outcomes of the elderly in Ghana. The study finds that having health insurance increases the elderly visits to a health facility and the probability of being treated by health professionals. For labour market outcomes, the results indicate that free health insurance increases both the number of hours worked and earnings of the elderly and the size of the increase in earnings in agriculture is slightly larger for females than with males.

I present empirical evidence that we are only about two thirds of the way through a multi-decade demographic transition that is pushing down interest rates, as a higher share of the population moves into a high asset holding stage of their life cycle. I also summarise some new research that links debt, income inequality and wealth inequality, which have additional downward effects on interest rates. To address the risk of limited space for future monetary easing in such a low interest rate environment, there are three types of policy available. Changes that enable policy rates to be cut into deeply negative territory; temporarily or permanently higher inflation rates; policies that raise the neutral rate, for example by lowering time spent in retirement, or by lowering income and wealth inequality.

This paper empirically studies the relationship between population aging and real house prices in 21 OECD countries. I redefine the old-age dependency ratio using the effective retirement age and remaining years to life expectancy to explore the heterogeneous aging effect on real house prices. I find that an increase in the dependency ratio based on remaining years to life expectancy explains a decrease in real house prices, but the dependency ratio of the effectively retired population does not. By splitting the young–old and the old–old groups, I confirm that the negative association with real house prices is driven by an increase in the dependency ratio of the old–old group. The findings overall suggest that population aging is unlikely to mean ever decreasing real house prices because the negative effect is driven by the very old population with a short expected remaining life.

Social protection schemes have been expanding around the world with the objective of protecting older persons during retirement. While theoretically they have been seen as tools to improve individual wellbeing, there are few studies that evaluate whether social pensions can improve health. In this study, we exploit the change in eligibility criteria for the South African Old Age grant to estimate the association between pension exposure eligibility and health of older persons. For this, we use data from the Health and Aging in Africa: A longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa (HAALSI) and model pension exposure in terms of its cumulative effect. Our results show that pension exposure is associated with better health as measured by a set of health indices. Disentangling these effects, we find that pension exposure is most likely to improve health through the delayed onset of physical disabilities in the elderly population. Our study highlights the relevance of social protection schemes as a mechanism to protect older persons physical health.