COVID-19 causes extremely high mortality among the old. This motivates a comparison of the losses of future lifetime years and future lifetime years of work ensuing from a hypothetical 25,000 excess deaths in Italy, whose affluent population is one of the world's oldest, with those in Kenya,...

The launch of Viagra in April 1998 led to a historically unprecedented high usage of erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs. We test whether Viagra's introduction significantly influenced outcomes for its target population such as STD rates of older men, as well as its non-target populations, such as...

Sexual activities between consenting adults of the same sex are still criminalized in more than one third of the countries in the world despite a global wave of decriminalization in the past sixty years. This paper empirically investigates the effect of sex ratios, i.e. relative number of men to...

We analyze the performance outcomes of National Hockey League (NHL) players over 18 seasons (1990-1991 to 2007-2008) as a function of the demographic conditions into which they were born. We have three main findings. First, larger birth cohorts substantially affect careers. A player born into a...

Population ageing will reduce economic growth and increase the amount of resources that need to be transferred to the elderly, putting pressure on retirement-income- and healthcare insurance systems. The Netherlands is better placed than most OECD countries to meet these pressures because it has...

Using a natural experiment in Taiwan, this paper shows that exposure to male-biased sex ratios at the marriageable ages is associated with a greater likelihood of death in later life. Half a million soldiers from Mainland China who retreated to Taiwan after a civil war in the late 1940s were...

Low fertility rates in EU countries since the 1960s are bringing about a number of economic and social consequences which will have a negative impact on productivity, economic growth, social-welfare programs,patterns of immigration, Europe's ability to pull its weight diplomatically, culturally...

Using a natural experiment in Taiwan, this paper shows that exposure to male-biased sex ratios at the marriageable ages is associated with a greater likelihood of death in later life. Half a million soldiers from Mainland China who retreated to Taiwan after a civil war in the late 1940s were...

There has been a slowdown in growth in the world's most advanced economies. In this paper we argue that changing demographics, in particular aging populations combined with increased life expectancy, may be part of the explanation for why we observe slower growth, falling interest rates and...

It follows from a number of theoretical models of marriage that the scarcer women are relative to men, i.e. the higher the sex ratio, the less married women are likely to participate in the labor force. Such sex ratio effects may be stronger among less educated women. These predictions are...