nep-age New Economics Papers
on Economics of Ageing
Issue of 2025–11–10
ten papers chosen by
Claudia Villosio, LABORatorio R. Revelli


  1. The Effect of Removing Early Retirement on Mortality By Han Ye; Cristina Bellés Obrero; Sergi Jiménez-Martín
  2. Elderly Dependence and Intergenerational Support in Vietnam: A Descriptive Perspective By Nguyen-Phung, Hang Thu; DAO, Trieu Minh
  3. Aging and Housing Returns By Natee Amornsiripanitch; Philip E. Strahan; Song Zhang
  4. Liquidity Shocks, Homeownership, and Income Inequality: Impact of Early Pension Withdrawals and Reduced Deposit By Hamza Hanbali; Gaurav Khemka; Himasha Warnakulasooriya
  5. The Impact of Macroeconomic Conditions on Long-Term Care: Evidence on Prices By Johannes Geyer; Peter Haan; Mia Teschner
  6. Health Effects of Retirement Policy Changes: Evidence from Japan By Mingjia XIE; Ting YIN; Emiko USUI; Yi ZHANG
  7. Do the Rich Really Save More? Answering an Old Question Using the Survey of Consumer Finances with Direct Measures of Lifetime Earnings and an Expanded Wealth Concept By Alice Henriques Volz; Elizabeth Llanes; Jeffrey P. Thompson
  8. Care on the Margins: Migrant Labour Regimes and the Reproduction of Segmented Long-Term Care Work in the EU By Quivine Ndomo; Elif Naz Kayran; Ilona Bontenbal; Simona Brunnerová; Sarah Tornberg; Mirjam Pot; Selma Kadi; Martin Kahanec
  9. Impact of potential policy changes on projected expenditure on adult social care By Hu, Bo; Hancock, Ruth; Wittenberg, Raphael; Mayorga, Joaquín; Pauschardt, Julia
  10. The workforce shortage on the Romanian labor market: Attempts to compensate through the admission of foreign quotas By Lazar, Cristina; Bostan, Ionel; Asalos, Nicoleta

  1. By: Han Ye; Cristina Bellés Obrero; Sergi Jiménez-Martín
    Abstract: This paper studies the mortality effects of delaying retirement by leveraging the 1967 Spanish pension reform, which exogenously increased the earliest voluntary claiming age from 60 to 65 based on individuals' date of first contribution. Using Spanish administrative data, we find that removing access to early retirement delays age at last employment by 4 months and increases the probability of death between ages 60 and 69 by 11 percent. The mortality effects are concentrated among workers in physically demanding, high-psychosocial-burden, and low- skilled occupations, while men and women are affected similarly. Access to flexible retirement mitigates the adverse effects of delaying retirement.
    Keywords: delaying retirement, early retirement, heterogeneity, mortality, work conditions
    JEL: I10 I12 J14 J26
    Date: 2025–10
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1528
  2. By: Nguyen-Phung, Hang Thu; DAO, Trieu Minh
    Abstract: Vietnam is experiencing rapid population aging, placing increasing pressure on families in a context of limited formal social protection. Adult children remain the primary source of financial and non-financial support for elderly parents, including co-residence, caregiving, and monetary transfers. This study examines how intergenerational support is influenced by parental needs, children's gender, and residential arrangements. Building on altruism and filial obligation frameworks, we hypothesize that children adjust their support when parents' needs are partially met, and that the amount and type of support vary by gender and co-residence status. Empirical findings suggest that shifts in gender roles have increasingly placed physical caregiving responsibilities on daughters, while sons continue to provide financial support. Rural households with limited pension coverage maintain strong cultural expectations for support, while urban households with pensions exhibit partial crowding-out of private transfers. Broader demographic and economic factors including declining fertility, high household savings, and a shrinking labor force further shape the sustainability and structure of intergenerational support. These results highlight the centrality of family-based care in Vietnam and provide a foundation for future research on elderly vulnerability, children's economic constraints, and the macroeconomic implications of population aging.
    Keywords: Aging population, Children, Pension, Gender, Resident status, Crowding Out, Intergenerational transfer, Vietnam
    Date: 2025–10
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agi:wpaper:02000252
  3. By: Natee Amornsiripanitch; Philip E. Strahan; Song Zhang
    Abstract: Older home sellers receive lower returns than younger home sellers. Homes sold by older people have fewer major renovations but higher rates of poor upkeep. Older sellers are also more likely to sell off-MLS (“pocket listings”) and to sell to investors, leading to lower prices. These patterns suggest that older sellers may be disproportionately disadvantaged by agents’ incentive to maximize fees through generating high sales volume instead of maximizing sale prices. Age-related cognitive decline makes the elderly more vulnerable. For causal evidence, we show that reforms making private listings more transparent reduced both the prevalence of pocket listings and the magnitude of the age gap in returns.
    Keywords: Aging; housing returns; incentive misalignment
    JEL: G5 J1
    Date: 2025–11–04
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedpwp:102051
  4. By: Hamza Hanbali; Gaurav Khemka; Himasha Warnakulasooriya
    Abstract: The paper analyzes two government policies affecting housing demand: early withdrawal from pension savings (EW), and reduction of loan deposit (RD). A model incorporating demand feedback on housing prices using Australian data shows both policies raise prices in the short run. RD delays or prevents access for low-income households, particularly in supply-constrained markets. EW improves accessibility across groups and is most efficient when full withdrawal is permitted, but can reduce retirement security if pension grows faster than property prices. The results also indicate that unequal outcomes stem not from price surges themselves but from pre-existing market disparities.
    Date: 2025–11
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2511.01133
  5. By: Johannes Geyer; Peter Haan; Mia Teschner
    Abstract: The price of institutional long-term care is a key determinant of the demand for both formal and informal long-term care. In this paper, we examine how the regional unemployment rate as a proxy for macroeconomic conditions influences these prices. Our analysis draws on administrative data that provide detailed information on all nursing homes and ambulatory care services, as well as all recipients of long-term care benefits in Germany. For identification, we exploit variation in macroeconomic conditions - measured by district-level unemployment rates over time - using a panel data approach with facility and time fixed effects. Our empirical findings indicate that higher unemployment rates lead to increased prices for permanent long-term care, including accommodation and meal costs in nursing homes. We provide evidence for the mechanisms underlying these price effects. While we find no significant impact of macroeconomic conditions on employment, working hours, or quality of care in nursing homes, our results suggest that higher unemployment rates raise nursing home prices through changes in the composition of patients. Specifically, economic downturns trigger a shift from recipients with lower levels of impairment to those requiring more labor-intensive care. Additionally, we observe a substitution effect, whereby low-impairment patients increasingly opt for ambulatory and informal home care instead of institutional care.
    Keywords: Long-Term Care, Nursing Home Prices, Unemployment Rate, Macroeconomic Conditions, Informal Care
    JEL: E32 I11 J20
    Date: 2025–10–28
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdp:dpaper:0080
  6. By: Mingjia XIE; Ting YIN; Emiko USUI; Yi ZHANG
    Abstract: We evaluate the health effects of hypothetical retirement policy changes, accounting for varied individual responses to policy changes and the heterogeneous health impacts of retirement. Using a Policy Relevant Treatment Effect (PRTE) framework with Japanese data, we find a policy’s net average health impact depends critically on its scale. Policies which cause marginal downward shifts in retirement rate improve average population health. Conversely, policies which induce large, substantial shifts lead to a net health decline as it faces individuals who stand to gain from retiring to continue working. Our findings highlight the importance of “selection on gains†and suggest that policymakers should favor incremental incentives over broad mandates.
    Date: 2025–10
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:25102
  7. By: Alice Henriques Volz; Elizabeth Llanes; Jeffrey P. Thompson
    Abstract: The question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of the distribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standard in this research to define affluent, or “rich, ” households as those with high lifetime earnings or income to better ground the empirical question in relevant theory. However, results in the literature are mixed regarding whether rich households in fact save more than others, with some studies suggesting a generally flat saving-rate profile across the distribution and others supporting the notion that the rich do indeed save more. Many empirical papers do not include direct measures of lifetime earnings, relying instead on proxies. Additionally, few include the full range of assets that low- and middle-income households depend on to finance their retirement, and even fewer use data that include sufficient samples of households that are in the extreme upper tails of the wealth or income distribution. The primary contribution of this paper is to combine all three in an examination of U.S. households. We use the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which oversamples high-net-worth households, in combination with direct estimation of lifetime earnings, to explore wealth-to-lifetime-earnings ratios—the cumulative impact of saving over time— across the lifetime earnings distribution. In addition, we use an expanded measure of wealth that includes the asset value of defined benefit pensions and Social Security, the public pension program. We find a steep gradient of saving when defining rich households by their lifetime earnings, which crucially includes business income in household earnings. The steepness, though, does not manifest until the top deciles of lifetime earnings. Recent research draws attention to the outsized contribution of capital gains in driving wealth accumulation of the rich; when we remove unrealized capital gains from our metrics, however, the gradient of the wealth–lifetime-earnings ratio is reduced but not removed.
    Keywords: distribution; lifetime earnings; pension; savings; Social Security; wealth; Survey of Consumer Finances
    JEL: D14 D31 E21 G51
    Date: 2025–10–01
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedbwp:102037
  8. By: Quivine Ndomo; Elif Naz Kayran; Ilona Bontenbal; Simona Brunnerová; Sarah Tornberg; Mirjam Pot; Selma Kadi; Martin Kahanec
    Abstract: This article investigates how migrant labour regimes shape long-term care (LTC) work in Austria, Finland, and Slovakia, amid rising demographic pressures and EU-wide care workforce shortages. Drawing on 39 qualitative interviews with migrant care workers and stakeholders, we apply a layered theoretical framework combining labour process theory and migrant labour regime theory centred on legal dualism, transnationalism, and labour agency to analyse the lived experiences of migrant LTC work. The study reveals how migration, industrial relations, and welfare regimes interact with labour agency to produce segmented and structurally marginal care roles for migrants. Despite divergent pathways into LTC including circular self-employment in Austria, education-based integration in Finland, and informal agency recruitment in Slovakia, all three regimes converge in their reliance on precarious, undervalued migrant labour. Migrant workers navigate these conditions through individualised strategies of resilience and reworking, with limited access to collective representation. Our findings highlight the emergence of niche migrant labour regimes that sustain care provision while reinforcing exclusion from core labour protections. The article contributes to industrial relations scholarship by theorising migrant LTC work as a labour process shaped by legal differentiation, constrained agency, and multi-scalar governance, raising critical questions about equity and sustainability in European care systems.
    Date: 2025–10–29
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cel:dpaper:74
  9. By: Hu, Bo; Hancock, Ruth; Wittenberg, Raphael; Mayorga, Joaquín; Pauschardt, Julia
    JEL: E6
    Date: 2025–04
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:129993
  10. By: Lazar, Cristina; Bostan, Ionel; Asalos, Nicoleta
    Abstract: Romania is facing a structural labor shortage, caused by factors such as demographic decline, massive external migration, an aging active population, and the mismatch between the education system and labor market demands. In this context, one of the solutions identified by the authorities is the controlled admission of quotas of foreign workers. This article analyzes the measures adopted to facilitate the legal import of labor and follows recent developments concerning the employment and posting of non-EU citizens in Romania, in parallel with trends in repeatedly declared vacant jobs. It presents relevant statistical data for the period 2021–2024 and puts forward concrete proposals for making the work permit and visa system more flexible, simplifying administrative procedures, and incentivizing employers through fiscal measures. The goal is to help balance the labor market and mitigate the negative effects of migration by promoting a model of legal and sustainable mobility that benefits both the national economy and foreign workers and their countries of origin.
    Keywords: Romania, labor market balance, deficit, labor import, quotas of foreign workers.
    JEL: J08 J11 J21 J23 J61
    Date: 2025
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:126172

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