The Role of Household Saving in the Economic Rise of China

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 regressions control for total population, output, and country and year fixed effects. The increase in the share of the population aged 35 to 49 accounts for a large portion of the observed increase in carbon dioxide emissions.