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on Economics of Ageing |
| By: | Dimitri B. Papadimitriou |
| Abstract: | The aging of the U.S. population will be a critical public policy issue in the years ahead. This paper surveys the recent literature on the economics of aging, with a special emphasis on government spending on the aged. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the proportion of the elderly in the total population will increase while the proportion of the working-age population will decline. This demographic shift implies a significant growth in the number of beneficiaries of major federal entitlement programs. Existing rules and escalating health care costs are expected to lead to fiscal pressures and to pose challenges for economic growth. The paper offers the author's assessment of the forces that determine government spending on retirees. It also examines how the retirement and health care of older citizens might be financed, and measures the potential impact of different reform proposals. Finally, it provides an introduction to an edited volume, Government Spending on the Elderly. |
| Date: | 2007–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_500&r=age |
| By: | Alexander Ludwig; Dirk Krueger; Axel H. Boersch-Supan |
| Abstract: | Demographic change has differential impacts on the welfare of current and future generations. In a simple closed economy, aging -- a relative scarcity of young workers -- increases wages, increasing the welfare of the young. At the same time, population aging will reduce rates of return to capital, thereby reducing the welfare of asset holders who are usually older than the population average. In a global world with pension systems, however, these effects are less straightforward, since international capital flows dampen the factor price changes. Moreover, pay-as-you-go pension systems financed by payroll taxes create a wedge between net and gross wages, and their intergenerational redistribution has important additional effects on the welfare of generations. To quantify these effects, we develop a large-scale multi-country overlapping generations model with uninsurable labor productivity and mortality risk. Due to the predicted relative abundance of the factor capital, the rate of return falls between 2005 and 2050 by roughly 90 basis points. Our simulations indicate that capital flows from rapidly ageing regions to the rest of the world will initially be substantial, but that trends are reversed when households de-cumulate savings. In terms of welfare, our model suggests that young individuals with little assets and currently low labor productivity indeed gain from higher wages associated with population aging. Older, asset-rich households tend to loose because of the predicted decline in real returns to capital. |
| JEL: | C68 D33 E17 E25 |
| Date: | 2007–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13185&r=age |
| By: | Felix Salditt; Peter Whiteford; Willem Adema |
| Abstract: | China is currently in the process of developing the largest pension system in the world, and it is doing this at a time of unparalleled economic and demographic transition. The central government has followed a step-by-step approach to develop a system that can accommodate a rapidly aging society within a rapidly growing, but still largely underdeveloped economy. This paper analyses how far the process of creating a national old age insurance system had proceeded by the end of 2006. It provides a detailed description of this system and an assessment of to what degree it has so far achieved ?its primary goal of social security for more people? (Chinese Government, September 2006)... <BR>La Chine est en train de mettre en place le plus grand système de retraite au monde, ceci à une époque de transition économique et démographique sans précédent. Le gouvernement central a suivi une approche graduelle pour créer un système qui puisse faire face à une société vieillissante dans une économie galopante et encore pour une bonne part sous-développée. Ce document montre jusqu'où le processus de création d'un système d'assurance national pour les personnes âgées a pu aller jusqu'à la fin de 2006. Il présente une description détaillée de ce système et évalue dans quelle mesure il a atteint au jour d'aujourd'hui « son objectif premier qui est la sécurité sociale pour plus de personnes » (Gouvernement chinois, septembre 2006)... |
| JEL: | H55 J11 P36 |
| Date: | 2007–06–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:elsaab:53-en&r=age |
| By: | Jørgensen, Peter Løchte (Department of Business Studies, Aarhus School of Business) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes an explicit return smoothing mechanism which has recently been <p> introduced as part of a new type of pension savings contract that has been offered by Danish life insurers. We establish the payoff function implied by the return smoothing mechanism and show that its probabilistic properties are accurately approximated by a suitably adapted lognormal distribution. The quality of the lognormal approximation is explored via a range of simulation based numerical experiments, and we point to several other potential practical applications of the paper’s theoretical results. |
| Keywords: | Account-based pension schemes; return smoothing; payoff distributions; density approximation; Monte Carlo simulation; Asian options |
| Date: | 2006–11–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhb:aarbfi:2006-09&r=age |
| By: | Daniel Schunk (Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging (MEA)) |
| Abstract: | Many motives for saving a portion of one’s income co-exist and their relative importance changes over the life-cycle. However, most existing work focuses on only one of those motives and makes simplifying assumptions about the other motives so that they can be relegated to the background. All the more it is important to investigate heterogeneity in saving behavior in the presence of various co-existing saving motives. This paper is concerned with linking heterogeneity in German households’ savings decisions to four coexisting saving motives. First, I find that the importance that households attach to the saving motives is related to how much households save at different life stages. Second, I classify the saver type of the households based on whether they engage in regular savings plans, or rather save irregularly and without a savings plan and I find that saving motives are related to the saver type of the household. The results show that heterogeneity in saving behavior along two dimensions – with respect to the saving rate and the saver type – is systematically related to the importance that households attach to different saving motives. This suggests that policy reforms that change the importance of certain saving motives in the eyes of private households might alter household saving behavior in various ways. |
| JEL: | D12 D91 E21 |
| Date: | 2007–06–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mea:meawpa:07124&r=age |