Demographic change belongs to the mega-trends of the 20th and the 21st century. The ongoing aging process in major industrialized countries gives rise to the relative scarcity of raw labor and the relative abundance of physical capital. Standard macroeconomic models suggest that this depresses...

This paper examines whether population shrinkage leads to changes in the urban hierarchy in terms of relative sizes of cities and their functions onomic geography. We work backwards in a racetrack economy with eight cities in a long-run equilibrium. Initial distribution of population is chosen...

In The Decline of the Welfare State, Assaf Razin and Efraim Sadka use a political economy framework to analyze the effects of aging populations, migration, and globalization on the deteriorating system of financing welfare state benefits as we know them. Their timely analysis, supported by a...