In the industrialized world the population is aging over time, reducing the fraction of the population in working age. Consequently labor is expected to be scarce, relative to capital, with an ensuing decline in the real return on capital. This paper uses demographic projections together with a...

This paper modifies standard block Gauss-Seidel iterations used by tatonnement methods for solving large scale deterministic heterogeneous agent models. The composite method between first- and second-order tatonnement methods is shown to considerably improve convergence both in terms of speed as...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized and developing countries vary in extent and timing but will reduce the share of the population in working age everywhere. Conventional wisdom suggests that this will increase capital intensity with falling rates of return to capital and increasing...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized countries will reduce the share of the workingage population. Analyses based on standard OLG models predict that these changes will increase the capital-labor ratio. Hence, rates of return to capital decrease and wages increase, which has adverse...

This paper employs a large scale overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous human capital formation using a Ben-Porath (1967) technology to evaluate the quantitative role of human capital adjustments for the economic consequences of demographic change. We find that endogenous human...

We ask whether a PAYG-financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We argue that interactions between the two risks are important for this question. One is a direct interaction in the form of a countercyclical variance of idiosyncratic...

This paper investigates consumer expenditures of German households pre- and post-retirement. The widely observed distinct drop in spending upon retirement entry poses an empirical puzzle since life cycle theory predicts smoothing of the marginal utility of consumption over time. As one...

This paper describes the general design of the SAVE survey: the design of the questionnaire, inter-viewer and interviewee motivation, and the sampling designs of the various subsamples collected in 2001 and 2003. It discusses the representativeness of the data, explains the construction of...

Medicare Part D provides prescription drug coverage through Medicare approved plans offered by private insurance companies and HMOs. In this paper, we study the role of current prescription drug use and health risks, related expectations, and subjective factors in the demand for prescription...

General purpose surveys typically refrain from using an exhaustive list of consumption expenditure items since the gain of more precise data on consumption is usually more than offset by the large increase in interview time and respondent effort which reduces re-sponse willingness. An...