Many papers show that aggregate fertility is pro-cyclical over the business cycle. In this paper we do something else: using data on more than 100 million births and focusing on within-year changes in fertility, we show that for recent recessions in the United States, the growth rate for...

I exploit the variation in demographic change across the United States to estimate the relationship between the age distribution in the population and the magnitude of cyclical output volatility. According to panel regression estimates, the relative supply of young workers, or youth share, has a...

We employ a model of precautionary saving to study why household saving rates are so high in China and so low in the US. The use of recursive preferences gives a convenient decomposition of saving into precautionary and non precautionary components. This decomposition indicates that over 80...

This paper studies how changing demographics can explain much of the evolution of China's household saving rate from 1955 to 2009. We undertake a quantitative investigation using an overlapping generations model in which agents live for 85 years. Agents begin to exercise decision making when...

We estimate the age distribution's impact on carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 2006 by exploiting demographic variation in a panel of 46 countries. To eliminate potential bias from endogeneity or omitted variables, we instrument for the age distribution with lagged birth rates, and the...