Longevity and technological change

We analyze the impact of increasing longevity on technological progress within an R&D-based endogenous growth framework and test the model's implications on OECD data from 1960 to 2011. The central hypothesis derived in the theoretical part is that - by raising the incentives of households to invest in physical capital and in R&D - decreasing mortality positively impacts upon technological progress and thereby also on productivity growth. The empirical results clearly confirm the theoretical prediction which implies that the ongoing demographic changes in industrialized economies are not necessarily detrimental to economic prosperity, at least as far as technological progress and productivity growth are concerned.