Population ageing will be the dominant feature of the world's demographic landscape in the coming decades, raising concerns about labor productivity and about economic outcomes at both the individual, enterprise, and macro levels. The articles in this special issue of Labour Economics define and...

Individuals aged 65 years and older currently make up a larger share of the population than ever before, and this group is predicted to continue growing both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the population. This chapter begins by introducing the facts, figures, and forecasts...

India, one of the world's two population superpowers, is undergoing unprecedented demographic changes. Increasing longevity and falling fertility have resulted in a dramatic increase in the population of adults aged 60 and up, in both absolute and relative terms. This change presents...

Population ageing is the 21st century's dominant demographic phenomenon. Declining fertility, increasing longevity, and the progression of large-sized cohorts to the older ages are causing elder shares to rise throughout the world. The phenomenon of population ageing, which is unprecedented in...

This chapter connects population aging with international migration. After documenting the trends for both, we review the supply-push and demand-pull determinants of migration, focusing particularly on the role of age and aging. We subsequently discuss the literature concerning the implications...

Higher life expectancy and rapidly aging populations have led to the introduction of pension programs in developing countries in the last two decades. Using the introduction of a new public policy in China, we estimate the effects of pension benefits on individual cognition, measured by episodic...

Analysing the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we present a new empirical method to investigate the extent to which households reduce their financial risk exposure when confronted with background risk. Our novel modelling approach – termed a deflated fractional ordered probit model –...

We show that household heads with a strong internal economic locus of control are more likely to hold equity and hold a larger share of equity in their investment portfolio. This relation holds when we control for economic preferences and possible confounders such as financial literacy,...

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We provide a direct test of this prediction in a representative sample of the Dutch population. Using individual-level data on return expectations for a broad...

We investigate the role of financial advice in shaping the composition of household portfolios in Great Britain. Advice is associated with a reallocation of wealth away from real estate and towards bonds and stocks, especially when households seek financial advice "for investments". Having a...