Demographic change belongs to the mega-trends of the 20th and the 21st century. The ongoing aging process in major industrialized countries gives rise to the relative scarcity of raw labor and the relative abundance of physical capital. Standard macroeconomic models suggest that this depresses...

We model the optimal reaction of a public PAYG pension system to demographic shocks. We compare the ex-ante first best and second best solution of a Ramsey planner with full commitment to the outcome under simple third best rules that mimic the pension systems observed in the real world. The...

This paper develops and estimates a closed-form model of Bayesian learning of subjective survival beliefs within the framework of Choquet decision theory. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) indicate that, on average, young respondents underestimate their true survival probability...

This paper employs a large scale overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous human capital formation using a Ben-Porath (1967) technology to evaluate the quantitative role of human capital adjustments for the economic consequences of demographic change. We find that endogenous human...

Ongoing demographic change will lead to a relative scarcity of raw labor to the effect that output growth will be decreasing in the next decades, a secular stagnation. As physical capital will be relatively abundant, this decrease of output will be accompanied by reductions of asset returns. We...