Economic Aging and Demographic Change

This paper presents a generalized model of overlapping generations with economic aging of households. Economic age is defined as a set of personal attributes such as earnings potential and tastes that are characteristic of a person's position in the life-cycle. We separate the concepts of economic age and time since birth in assuming only a small number of different states of age. Agents sharing the same economic characteristics are aggregated analytically to a low number of age groups. The model thus allows for a very parsimonious approximation of life-cycle differences in earnings, wealth and consumption. As an illustration, we quantitatively apply the model to study the impact of demographic change.