April 2019

Pension burden: More Japanese opt to retire late, extend employment period

Some economists expect the average pension-to-wage ratio to keep deteriorating and worries are growing that Japan's 'pay-as-you-go' pension scheme may be unsustainable Yasuhiro Furuse could have retired two years ago, but he wasn’t entirely happy with his pension income and had to put any such thoughts to bed.It was just as well for Furuse’s employer Orix Corp, a financial services group, which would have struggled to find a replacement, with Japan’s jobless rate at 26-year lows. This win-win arrangement, increasingly common...

Demographic Challenges for Management: Fad or Reality?

By Eleanna Galanaki (Athens University of Economics and Business), Emma Parry (Cranfield School of Management), Ilona Bučiūnienė (ISM University of Management and Economics), Leda Panayotopoulou (Athens University of Economics and Business) Theory and practice in Human Resource Management (HRM) generally focuses on two levels of analysis: the individual and the organization. However, there is a growing recognition that HRM is manifested within larger environmental settings and several HRM researchers have approached the field with a more macro perspective. For example,...

March 2019

Individual Attitudes Towards Immigration in Aging Populations

By Rana Comertpay, Andreas Irmen (University of Luxembourg), Anastasia Litina (University of Ioannina) This research empirically establishes the hypothesis that the process of population aging in a society as a whole affects the attitudes of its members towards immigration. Hence, an aging social environment exerts an effect on the attitudes of individuals towards immigration after accounting for their age and other individual characteristics. We test this hypothesis in a multilevel analysis of individuals living in 25 European OECD countries over...

Can an Ageing Workforce Explain Low Inflation?

By Benoît Mojon (Bank for International Settlements (BIS)) & Xavier Ragot (Banque de France) Why is wage inflation so weak in spite of the recent sharp reduction in unemployment? We show that this may be due to an ongoing change in the composition of the labor supply. Indeed, the participation rate of workers aged between 55 and 64 has increased steadily over the last decade, from a third to above a half on average across OECD countries. This is most...

Population Aging, Health Care, and Fiscal Policy Reform: The Challenges for Japan

By Minchung Hsu (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS)) & Tomoaki Yamada (Meiji University - School of Commerce) We construct a transition analysis based on a general equilibrium life‐cycle model to investigate the effects of aging, and we evaluate various policy alternatives designed to lessen the negative influence of aging. In particular, we analyze reforms of insurance benefits and tax financing tools that were recently the focus of a great amount of attention and debate in Japan because of...

Staying Put: Adapting the Places Instead of the People

By Susan Lanspery &‎ Joan Hyde Most existing housing offers a poor fit for older people and people with disabilities, and new construction adds less than 2 per cent to the housing each year. Ninety-nine percent of the housing that will be in use in the year 2000 exists today. The long-needed anthology "Staying Put: Adapting the Places Instead of the People" emphasizes the disabilities and abilities of environments instead of individuals. With contributions from leading authorities, it integrates a...

The Costs and Benefits of Caring: Aggregate Burdens of an Aging Population

By Finn Kydland (Carnegie Mellon University - David A. Tepper School of Business; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) - Department of Economics), Nick Pretnar (Carnegie Mellon University) Throughout the 21st century, population aging in the United States will lead to increases in the number of elderly people requiring some form of living assistance which, as some argue, is to be seen as a burden on society, straining old-age insurance systems and requiring younger agents to devote an increasing fraction of...

Understanding the Spatial Disparities and Vulnerability of Population Aging in China

By Yang Cheng (Beijing Normal University (BNU)), Siyao Gao (Beijing Normal University (BNU)), Shuai Li (Beijing Normal University (BNU)), Yuchao Zhang (Independent), Mark Rosenberg (Queen's University) Understanding the regional pattern of population aging in China enables rational policy making to address the challenges of inequity in social welfare and care resources among the east–central–west regions and rural–urban areas of China. This study uses census data in 2000 and 2010, and aging population ratios, annual increase rates, and spatial auto-correlation analysis...

February 2019

On the Political Feasibility of Increasing the Legal Retirement Age

By Benjamin Bittschi (ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research) & Berthold Ulrich Wigger Within a politico-economic model we first establish three hypotheses: (i) Retirees generally prefer a higher retirement age than workers, whereby just retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age, (ii) in equilibrium the level of the legal retirement age is increasing in longevity and (iii) decreasing in the public pension replacement rate. We then test these hypotheses empirically. Employing micro data for Germany we corroborate the...

Assessing Economic Resources in Retirement: The Role of Irregular Withdrawals from Tax-Advantaged Retirement Accounts

By Michael D. Hurd (RAND Corporation; State University of New York at Stony Brook - College of Arts and Science - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)) & Susann Rohwedder (RAND Corporation) Irregular withdrawals from IRAs and DC pensions are not included in standard measures of household income in the CPS or Health and Retirement Study. Yet, among retirees such withdrawals can supplement regular retirement income to finance consumption. It has been difficult to assess their importance,...