Many countries face the problem of how to reform social security systems to cope with increasing life expectancy. This raises questions concerning both distribution and risk sharing across generations. These issues are addressed within an OLG model with stochastic life expectancy across...

How does population aging affect economic growth and factor shares in times of increasingly automatable production processes? The present paper addresses this question in a new macroeconomic model of automation where competitive firms perform tasks to produce output. Tasks require labor and...

Slower growth of the labour force and an increase in old-age dependency will reduce the growth of aggregate output and output per capita in many developed countries. However, a major question is whether there is any systematic link between demographics and the productivity of those who will...

The paper uses a continuous-time overlapping-generations model with endogenous growth and pollution accumulation over time to study the link between longevity and global warming. It is seen that increasing longevity accelerates climate change in a business-as-usual scenario without climate...

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

Empirical research has given cause to fear that the demographic ageing in industrialized countries is likely to exert a negative impact on educational spending. These papers have linked the share of the elderly with the per capita or per pupil spending on education at the local, state-wide or...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the macroeconomic return to population health. The macro-based approach tends to yield estimates that are either negative and close to zero or positive and an order of magnitude larger than the range of estimates derived from the...

One of the most important controversies in health economics concerns the question whether the imminent aging of the population in most OECD countries will place an additional burden on the tax payers who finance public health care systems. Proponents of the "red-herring hypothesis" argue that...

20 years ago, Zweifel, Felder and Meier (1999) established the by now famous "red-herring" hypothesis, according to which population ageing does not lead to an increase in per capita health care expenditures (HCE) because the observed positive correlation between age and health care expenditures...

International migration flows largely reflect demographic patterns and economic opportunities. Migration flows increase in expected income and other pull factors in potential destinations, and in push factors in the origin, like high unemployment, low wages, and high population growth. Migration...