Between 1950 and 2017, world average life expectancy increased from below-50 to above-70, while the fertility rate dropped from 5 to about 2.5. We develop and calibrate an analytic climate-economy model with overlapping generations to study the effect of such demographic change on capital...

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari (BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ...

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...

Voigtländer and Voth argue that the Black Death shifted England towards pastoral agriculture, increasing wages for unmarried women, thereby delaying female marriage, lowering fertility, and unleashing economic growth. We show that this argument does not hold. Its crucial assumption is...

This paper analyzes the impact of urbanization on CO2 emissions in developing countries, taking into account the presence of heterogeneity in the sample of countries and testing for the stability of the estimated elasticities over time. The sample covers the period from 1975 through 2003 for...

We provide evidence that lower fertility can simultaneously increase income per capita and lower carbon emissions, eliminating a trade-off central to most policies aimed at slowing global climate change. We estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions accounting for the fact that...

R&D-based growth theory suggests that a larger population size raises either the long-run rate of economic growth (“strong scale effect”) or the level of per capita income (“weak scale effect”), with far-reaching policy implications. However, for modern times there is little empirical...

In this paper, we investigate two fiscal policy options to mitigate fiscal pressure arising from ageing of the Australian population: pension cuts or tax hikes. Using a computable overlapping generations model, we find that while both policy options achieve the same fiscal goal, the...

We analyse whether, when and how local office-holders respond to the personal, economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and/or remuneration of local office-holders. Using data from all 589 Belgian municipalities over the period...

The paper analyses the impact of demographic developments on the German pension system until the year 2060. The projections are simulated for a range of assumptions on the latest demographic trends and on the labour market and comprise the latest pension legislation. As a central innovation we...