This Study looks at compensating differentials in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to derive estimates of the levels of time preference for labor force participants in each of 15 waves of data from 1979 to 1994. With these estimates the evolution of time preference over the life course is described. Future utility among labor force participants appears to be valued more highly by subjects who are older, more schooled, white, or male. Controlling for schooling level, a higher IQ is associated with a preference for more immediate rewards. If social rates of time preference are correlated with individual rates of time preference then population aging could create intergenerational asymmetries in the social rate of time preference. This phenomenon could make the optimal investments of young populations appear selfish to future generations that are older.
We examine how well the schooling coefficient in standard Mincer equations, estimated on Swedish data for 1968, 1981 and 1991, approximates the marginal internal rate of return to education. We find three cases where inference from the estimated schooling coefficient is misleading. First, the decline in return to schooling from 1968 to 1981 is mainly concentrated to college education, whereas the return to high school education is stable. Second, the rate of return is sensitive to the assumption made about the length of working life, or the retirement decision. Third, both the schooling coefficient and the internal rate of return give misleading information about the value of adult education. By comparing the present value of lifetime earnings between youth and adult education, we find large differences in favor of youth education, even though the schooling coefficient and the internal rate of return are the same.
We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an OLG model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to work and at which they retire. Endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of generation-specific human capital. Favorable shifts in the survival probabilities induce longer schooling and later retirement but have an ambiguous effect on per-capita growth, The long-term relationship between fertility and per-capita growth is hump-shaped. Increases in longevity can be responsible for a switch from a no-growth regime to a sustained growth regime and for a positive relationship between fertility and growth to vanish. Solving numerically the equilibrium, demographic changes can have important medium-term effects even if long-term changes are very small.
This paper explores how EU countries can address various challenges (including the aging of the population) affecting their systems of old-age income support. It presents two scenarios illustrating the most important uncertainties surrounding the major developments that affect the pension systems of the EU. To diversify these risks, EU governments should act on several fronts. In addition to the formation of human capital (especially that of children), employment (especially that of older workers) should be boosted. This calls for social insurance reform with more emphasis on individual saving schemes. Pension schemes should be more explicit about how they share demographic and other risks. Countries that currently rely heavily on public pay-as-you-go (PAYG) schemes should stimulate private pensions by gradually reducing PAYG benefits collected by high-income earners, by issuing new financial instruments, and by conducting intergenerational risk sharing through the tax system.
The aim of the paper is to investigate the joint redistributive effects of migration and pensions and to reassess the sustainability issue raised in the existing economic literature. The paper first develops a theoretical framework to analyse the impact of international migration on the labour market. The model allows for heterogeneity across native-born individuals and for migrants to affect both the wages and the education decision in the recipient country. It then explicitly focuses on pensions under alternative migration scenarios. The analysis shows that migration causes redistributive effects which increase across-group wage inequality. However, the endogenous educational response by residents partially offsets the redistributive impact of migration while creating additional interest groups. Migration helps the financial sustainability of the pension scheme but the interaction between migration and pensions causes complex inter- and intragenerational redistributive conflicts, which are analysed in the paper.
Early retirement was introduced after the appearance of redundant middle-aged workers, not entitled to pensions. This distortionary policy reduces human capital accumulation and economic growth, but shifts part of the tax burden on future generations. Why was it adopted? Alternative policies, which do not introduce long-term distortions, but impose a larger cost on the current generation of workers, were blocked by a coalition of high income workers, who did not plan to retire early, but sought to reduce the current tax burden, and low income workers, who expected to retire early and to benefit from the early retirement pension.
We address the issue of capital vs. labor income taxation in an overlapping generations model with a positive externality in the human capital production. We compare the performance of the economy in the steady state under different tax policies. Three results are obtained. First, the size of the tax revenue required strongly affects the optimal (welfare maximizing) capital-labor income tax portfolio. In particular, a zero physical capital income tax rate need not be optimal. Second, the way in which the finite life cycle is split between the working and the retirement period also matters. And third, the size of the externality in the human capital production also affects the optimal income tax rate mix.
Conventional wisdom suggests that aging of population will increase political pressure to tilt the composition of social spending in favor of the elderly, while potentially sacrificing other publicly provided goods such as education. This view seems to be supported by recent empirical findings that per child public education spending tends to be lower in US jurisdictions with higher fraction of elderly residents. Do these cross-sectional findings also carry the dynamic implication that longevity will lead over time to waning political support for funding of public education? This paper challenges such implication. We present a model that is consistent with the aforementioned cross-sectional regressions yet predicts an overall positive impact of increasing longevity on public education funding and economic growth.
In this paper we use a national panel of public school districts to study the impact of an aging population on public education spending. In contrast to previous analyses that use state-level data, we find that the elderly have only a modest overall negative effect on education spending at the district level. Our results confirm, however, that a growing share of elderly at the state level tends to depress state spending on education. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the elderly believe only higher local spending is capitalized into house values.
This paper studies the relationship between public education and pay-as-you-go social security in a representative democracy, where the government reacts both to voting and lobbying activities of workers and pensioners. While an intergenerational conflict prevails concerning actual social security contributions, workers may prefer public education for its positive effect on later pension benefits. Population aging diminishes the relative lobbying power of pensioners, leading to a higher contribution rate, educational expansion, and higher per capita income growth.
The evolution of technology causes human capital to become obsolete. We study this phenomenon in an overlapping generations setting, assuming that technology evolves stochastically and that older workers find updating uneconomic. Experience and learning by doing may offer the old some income protection, but technology advance always turns them into has-beens to some degree. We focus on the determinants (demand elasticities, persistence of technology change, etc.) of the severity of the has-beens effect. It can be large, even leading to negatively sloped within-occupation age-earnings profiles and an occupation dominated by a few young, high-income workers. Architecture displays the sort of features the theory identifies as magnifying the has-beens effect, and both anecdotes and some data suggest that the has-beens effect in architecture is extreme indeed.
In the last few decades in the United States birth rates have declined and longevity has risen while productivity growth has slowed. Given such changes, the increasing burden of funding programs for the elderly is likely to shift resources away from the young and toward the elderly. This paper uses an overlapping generations framework to examine the effects of tax policies on an aging economy. We find that if the quality of the education system is sufficiently high then raising the education tax rate and subsequently lowering the social security tax rate enhances growth and welfare.
This paper studies the ability of nonmarket institutions to invest optimally in forward intergenerational goods (FIGs), such as education and the environment, when agents are selfish or exhibit paternalistic altruism. We show that backward intergenerational goods (BIGs), such as social security, play a crucial role in sustaining investment in FIGs: without them investment is inefficiently low, but with them optimal investment is possible. We also show that making the provision of BIGs mandatory crowds out the voluntary provision of FIGs, and that population aging can increase investment in FIGs.
Data for the United States and countries in western Europe indicate a negative correlation between the dependency ratio and labor tax rates and the generosity of social transfers, after other factors that influence the size of the welfare state are controlled for. This occurs despite the increased political clout of the dependent population implied by the aging of the population. This paper develops an overlapping generations model of intra- and intergenerational transfers (including old-age social security) and human capital formation that addresses this seeming puzzle. We show that with democratic voting, an increase in the dependency ratio can lead to lower taxes or less generous social transfers.
Using a calibrated general equilibrium overlapping generations model, which explicitly accounts for differences between immigrants and natives, this paper investigates whether a reform of immigration policies alone could resolve the fiscal problems associated with the aging of the baby boom generation. Such policies are found to exist and are characterized by an increased inflow of working-age high- and medium-skilled immigrants, One particular feasible policy involves admitting 1.6 million 40-44-year-old high-skilled immigrants annually. These findings are illustrated by computing the discounted government gain of admitting additional immigrants, conditional on their age and skills.
The focus of endogenous growth theory on human capital formation and the physical embodiment of knowledge in people, suggests the integration of the growth supporting character of health production and the growth generating services of human capital accumulation in an endogenous growth framework. We show that a slow down in growth may be explained by a preference for health that is positively influenced by a growing income per head, or by an ageing population. Growth may virtually disappear for countries with high rates of decay of health, low productivity of the health-sector, or high rates of discount.
Exploiting long term interindustry demand shifts, this article provides evidence that (1) industry-level wages do not respond to industry demand conditions; (2) at the industry level, the employment of young workers responds more to demand shifts than does the employment of experienced workers; and (3) the postdisplacement wages of displaced workers are strongly affected by demand in their predisplacement industries. These findings are consistent with a model in which worker's investments in industry-specific skills pose a barrier to interindustry labor mobility and wages do not respond to spot labor market conditions.
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