February 2020

International Handbook on Ageing and Public Policy (Handbooks of Research on Public Policy)

By Sarah Harper, kate Hamblin With the collective knowledge of expert contributors in the field, The International Handbook on Ageing and Public Policy explores the challenges arising from the ageing of populations across the globe. With an expansive look at the topic, this comprehensive Handbook examines various national state approaches to welfare provisions for older people and highlights alternatives based around the voluntary and third-party sector, families and private initiatives. Each of these issues are broken down further and...

January 2020

Health Inequality Among Chinese Older Adults: The Role of Childhood Circumstances

By Binjian Yan, Xi Chen, Thomas M. Gill This paper examines the extent to which childhood circumstances contribute to health inequality in old age and how the contributions may vary across key dimensions of health. We link the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2013 and 2015 with its Life History Survey in 2014 to quantify health inequality due to childhood circumstances for which they have little control. We evaluate comprehensive dimensions of health ranging from cognitive...

How are Employers Responding to an Aging Workforce?

By: Robert L. Clark, Beth Ritter The American population is aging and changes in the population’s age structure are leading to an aging of the nation’s workforce. In addition, changes to age specific participation rates are exacerbating the aging of the national labor force. An important challenge for firms and organizations is how does workforce aging affect labor costs, productivity and the sustainability of the organization. This paper examines employer responses to workforce aging including changes retirement policies, modification...

Effect of Immigration on Depression Among Older Natives in Western Europe

By: Jose Escarce, Lorenzo Rocco To our knowledge, no study has examined the effect of immigration on the health of older natives. We use the Study of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to investigate whether immigration affects depression among natives 65-80 years old. Immigration may increase the supply and lower the price of personal and household services, a term that refers to care services and non-care services such as cleaning, meal preparation, and domestic chores. Higher consumption...

Demographic Obstacles to European Growth

By: Thomas F. Cooley, Espen Henriksen, Charlie Nusbaum Since the early 1990’s the growth rates of the four largest European economies—France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom—have slowed. This persistent slowdown suggests a low-frequency structural change is at work. A combination of longer individual life expectancies and declining fertility have led to gradually ageing populations. Demographic change affects economic growth directly through households savings and labor supply decisions and also growth indirectly through the pension systems and the need to...

December 2019

The Right of Older Persons to Work and to Access the Labour Market

By Andrew C. Byrnes, Israel Issi Doron, Nena Georgantzi, Bill Mitchell, Bridget Sleap This paper was prepared as a submission to the United Nations General Assembly Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing, which is considering the desirability of the development of a new international treaty on the human rights of older persons. The paper explores issues relating to the participation of older persons in the labour market, in particular the barriers to their entry to and continued participation in paid...

Debt Close to Retirement and Its Implications for Retirement Well-being

By Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell, Noemi Oggero We analyze debt and debt management of Americans nearing retirement age. We show that older people have numerous financial obligations that can lead to financial distress. Using data from the 2015 National Financial Capability Study and an extensive literature review, we show that lack of financial literacy, lack of information, and behavioral biases help explain the prevalence of debt later in life. Our evidence indicates that debt at older ages can...

The Old-Age Security Motive for Fertility: Evidence from the Extension of Social Pensions in Namibia

By Pauline Rossi (University of Amsterdam), Mathilde Godard (GATE-LSE, Lyon) The old-age security motive for fertility postulates that people's needs for old-age support raise the demand for children. We test this widespread idea using the extension of social pensions in Namibia during the nineties. The reform eliminated inequalities in pension coverage and benefit across regions and ethnic groups. Combining differences in pre-reform pensions and differences in exposure across cohorts, we show that pensions substantially reduce fertility, especially in late...

The Comprehensive Wealth of Older Immigrants and Natives

By David A. Love, Lucie Schmidt This article compares the retirement preparations of immigrant and native-born Americans aged 51 or older. The authors estimate the present value of future income streams in calculating measures of comprehensive wealth and an annualized equivalent. In addition to some significant differences in median annualized wealth between immigrants and natives, the authors find that the most recent waves of immigrants are more financially vulnerable in retirement than earlier immigration cohorts were at similar ages....

November 2019

The Effect of Aging on the Age-wage Profile

By Toshikatsu Inoue Despite its importance, many macroeconomic models do not capture the changes in the age-wage profile over time. The flattening of the age-wage profile in Japan and the relative increase in the aging workforce suggests the existence of demand law in relative labor inputs and wages of each age, which is abstracted from the standard macroeconomic model. In this study, we build a model using the aggregate production function that creates a downward slope labor demand curve....