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This paper examines the impact of male casualties due to World War II on fertility and female employment in the United States. We rely on the number of casualties at the county-level and use a difference-in-differences strategy. While most counties in the U.S. experienced a Baby Boom following the war, we find that the in- crease in fertility was lower in high-casualty rate counties than in low-casualty rate counties. Analyzing the channels through which male casualties could have decreased fertility, we provide evidence that county male casualties are positively related to 1950s female employment and household income.

The first article in this two-part series demonstrated that the post-World War II ‘baby boom’ and increasing life expectancy implies that there will be a considerable increase in deaths in the UK over the next 40 years. As the highest proportion of lifetime hospital bed occupancy occurs in the last 1 year of life, this has significant implications for bed planning. Not only can death act as a predictor of hospital use in the final year of life, it is also a key indicator of wider morbidity and mortality trends. Part two of this series investigates the wider implications of these findings, showing that the current NHS funding formula completely omits the nearness-to-death effect when predicting bed usage. As a result, the formula becomes dependent on the year in which it is primed, leading to gross over- and under-funding in subsequent years. These same issues also have serious implications for the minimum number of beds for financial stability in a Clinical Commissioning Group. A pragmatic overview is given regarding how to modify current bed models so that they can give answers that reflect real-world demand.

Objectives Increasing socioeconomic disparities, including in life expectancy, have important implications for the U.S. Social Security program. This study examined inter- and intracohort trends in Social Security retirement benefits, paying special attention to how lifetime benefit trajectories by socioeconomic circumstance shift across cohorts encompassing current and future retirees. Methods Using a dynamic microsimulation model based on representative survey data linked to administrative records, we developed a set of cohort-specific projections that estimate monthly and lifetime Social Security retirement benefits for retirees spanning the early baby boom (1945–1954) to Generation X (1965–1974) cohorts. Results We found a widening socioeconomic gap in projected monthly and lifetime benefits for men and women, especially on a lifetime basis. This divergence is associated with stagnation of benefit levels among lower socioeconomic status groups coupled with upward shifts among higher strata groups. Distributional changes are linked with increasing differential mortality, but other factors also likely play a role such as rising education premiums, growing earnings inequality, and changes in women’s work and relationship histories. Discussion Widening mortality differentials can lead to distributional changes in the U.S. Social Security program. Microsimulation methodology lends insights into how the socioeconomic gap in monthly and lifetime benefit distributions may change among future older Americans in the context of differential mortality and other demographic changes. Moving forward in time, these complex patterns could offset some of the progressivity built into the system.

Downward pressure on the natural rate of interest (r*) is often attributed to an increase in saving. This study uses microeconomic data from the SCF+ to explore the relative importance of demographic shifts versus rising income inequality on the evolution of saving behavior in the United States from 1950 to 2019. The evidence suggests that rising income inequality is more important than the aging of the baby boom generation in explaining the decline in r*. Saving rates are significantly higher for high income households within a given birth cohort relative to other households in the same birth cohort, and there has been a large rise in income shares for high income households since the 1980s. The result has been a large rise in saving by high income earners since the 1980s, which is the exact same time period during which r* has fallen. Differences in saving rates across the working age distribution are smaller, and there has not been a consistent monotonic shift in income toward any given age group. Both findings challenge the view that demographic shifts due to the aging of the baby boom generation explain the decline in r*.

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium-to-low skill premium since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among workers aged 30 or below. Using a nested CES production function framework which allows for imperfect substitutability between young and old workers, we show that changes in relative labor supplies can explain these patterns very well. A cohort-level analysis reveals that distinct secular changes in the educational attainment of the native population are the primary source of the declining relative supply of medium-skilled workers in Germany. Low-skilled immigration, in contrast, only plays a secondary role in explaining the rising lower-end wage inequality in Germany over recent decades. Albrecht Glitz gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D, SEV-2015-0563) and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (through the National Programme for the Promotion of Talent and Its Employability, the Ramón y Cajal grants, MINECO-RYC-2015-18806, and Project No. ECO2017-83668-R (AEI/FEDER, UE)). He also thanks the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding his Heisenberg Fellowship (GL 811/1-1) and Alexandra Spitz-Oener for hosting him at Humboldt University Berlin. Daniel Wissmann acknowledges funding through the International Doctoral Program “Evidence-Based Economics” of the Elite Network of Bavaria and the LMU Forschungsfonds. This study uses the factually anonymous Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (version 1975-2010). Data access was provided via a Scientific Use File supplied by the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Project No. 101003.

The developed world in the last few decades has experience an unprecedented demographic change. In virtually all OECD countries, people are getting older—a lot older. The reasons are dramatic baby bust, following the equally dramatic baby boom, and the remarkable increase in life expectancy. Fiscal prospects depend on two factors, in order to mitigate adverse macroeconomic impact of ageing. The first is the potential for capital deepening. The second is increased immigration. This chapter offers a new analytical framework to study the interactions between migration and welfare state policies, driven by ageing.

Over the 1948–2013 period, many factors significantly impacted on human capital, which in turn affected economic growth in the United States. This chapter analyzes these factors within a complete national income accounting system, which integrates Jorgenson-Fraumeni human capital into the accounts. By including human capital, a fresh perspective on economic growth across time and within specific subperiods is revealed, notably regarding the 1995–2000 and 2007–2009 periods. During the first period, the reduction in human capital investment significantly reduced apparent economic growth. In the second period, the increase in human capital investment tempered the negative impact of the Great Recession. Over the 1948–2013 period, first the post-World War baby boom, and then, the substantial increase in education led to higher economic growth than otherwise measured. As the pace of increase in education slowed and the workforce aged toward the end of the period, human capital induced growth was reduced.

Recent research on the baby boom and its causes has shown that common explanations, such as the recuperation of births following the Great Depression or Second World War, are not sufficient to account for the phenomenon. However, that research has stressed the role of increasing nuptiality. In this paper, we argue that the increase in survivorship of children and young people that resulted from the epidemiologic transition accounted for a large portion of the increased number of births during the baby boom. We use a microsimulation model to assess the respective roles of mortality, nuptiality, fertility, and immigration on the size and dynamics of the boom in Quebec, Canada. Results show that decreasing mortality contributed significantly to the baby boom, along with immigration and nuptiality changes, while fertility rates attenuated the phenomenon. These results substantiate the hypothesis that the epidemiologic transition was an important cause of the baby boom.

Raising children takes considerable time, particularly for women. Yet, the role of childcare time has received scant attention in the macroeconomics literature. We develop a life-cycle model in which the time dimension of childcare plays a central role. An important contribution of the paper is estimation of the parameters of a childcare production function using data on primary and secondary childcare time as reported in the American Time Use Survey (2003–2014). The model does a better job matching the observed life-cycle patterns of womens' time use than a model without childcare. Our counterfactual experiments show that the increase in the relative wage of women since the 1960s is an important factor in the increase in womens' work time; changes in fertility associated with the baby boom play a smaller role, and changes in the price of durables are found to have a negligible effect. We consider the effects of cheaper daycare. Not surprisingly, this experiment leads to greater use of daycare and more time allocated to market work. A knock-on effect of cheaper daycare is a substantial decline in primary childcare time.

This paper examines the short- and long-run effects of a quasi-exogenous variation in fertility behavior due to a yearlong period of power rationing in Colombia in 1992. We show that power shortages caused a mini baby boom and that the increase in fertility was unplanned and persistent: the time in between births was reduced and overall lifetime fertility increased. We also present evidence suggesting that women who had a baby due to the outage found themselves in worse socioeconomic conditions 12 years later.\ud \ud

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature examining the effects of population age structure on financial asset prices, including critical reviews of the methodologies used and an evaluation of contradictory results. The survey focuses on the effects of the Baby Boom generation on asset prices, and in particular, the question of the asset meltdown hypothesis (AMH). The existing literature reveals that an asset meltdown may never eventuate nevertheless it remains plausible that ageing of the Baby Boomers will have a significant negative impact on asset prices. The previous studies were based on where the proportion of the old age population is relatively low. With the first Baby Boomers reaching 65 years of age in 2011 this proportion is projected to increase substantially and hence the effect is reinforced. Thus new research is needed to address the unresolved issues given that population ageing has serious policy issues in the developed economies.

Increasing disruptions and heterogeneity in employment biographies, a growing number of unemployment experiences, later labour market entries, and an increase in atypical forms of employment lead to declines of statutory pension entitlement accumulation over the life course. Moreover, in accordance with Easterlin (1987) , significant economic disadvantages can be expected for large generations. In fact, the German baby boomers born in the 1950s and 1960s, the next generation of pensioners, will have to accept several additional pension cuts due to pension reforms. Against this background, we ask how different employment patterns are related to disproportional statutory pension entitlements for German baby boomers in the middle of their working life. We examine work trajectories and their implications for accrued statutory pension entitlements by the age of 42 for two baby boomer cohorts in comparison to two older cohorts. For our analyses, we employ the Biographical Data of Selected Insurance Agencies in Germany (BASiD) for those born in 1947, 1953, 1959 and 1965 (N = 25,863). In the first step, we summarise the most important employment patterns of the cohorts under study. In the second step, we test the influence of these employment patterns on the accumulation of individual statutory pension entitlements until the age of 42 and compare the baby boomer cohorts to previous cohorts. We find that late entries to employment as well as diversified and unstable employment are related to lower levels of statutory pension entitlements for particular groups of German baby boomers.

After World War II, the fertility rate in Japan declined in two phases. The first phase was the decline in the 1950s after the baby boom in the late 1940s, resulting in replacement level fertility in the 1960s. The second phase was the decline from the 1970s, which lead to below replacement level fertility in the society. The main cause of the fertility decline in Japan since the 1970s was the decreasing marriage rate. In this chapter, factors influencing the decreasing marriage rate are explored through an empirical data analysis. The main cause of the decreased marriage rate was the marriage market mismatch. An increasing number of women were obtaining high educational qualifications and were more likely to not marry men with a lower social status. On the other hand, for men, the labor market became increasingly severe. A solution to this continued mismatch problem is to increase the number of dual-earner households. However, a dual-earner lifestyle is still difficult to achieve for most people in Japan.

Objectives While a large body of evidence exists in support of outcomes associated with cumulative dis/advantage (CAD), individual-level experiences of the systemic processes that generate unequal outcomes have received far less attention. This study explored experiences, among members of an early baby-boom birth cohort, of CAD-generative processes within the education and housing systems and the mechanisms by which they interacted with initial social position to perpetuate inequalities. Methods The author conducted in-depth interviews (n = 27) with members of the Newcastle Thousand Families Study, a UK 1947 birth cohort. Longitudinal survey data enabled participant sampling on the basis of gender, occupational social class at birth and age 50, educational attainment and homeownership status at age 60. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results Analysis identified two themes: Firstly, the sorting and funneling mechanisms by which the “meritocratic” education system interacted with initial social position, progressively narrowing aspirations and opportunities; and secondly, the creation in later life of winners and losers in the property market, resulting in legitimization of inequalities through a deservingness narrative. Discussion CAD has proved persistent, even among the supposedly “lucky” early baby-boom cohort. Policies to ameliorate CAD generation through education and property systems act instead to entrench advantaged social positions. Later-life outcomes can be naturalized as the product of effort-plus-ability if not seen in a whole-life context. Disruption of CAD processes requires challenging vested interest inherent in social systems.

Baby boomers—comprised of persons born between 1946 and 1964—made up almost one-third of the US population in 2010, the year that the first baby boomers reached retirement age. The baby boom generation is increasingly dominating the older segment of the population. However, we have not yet thoroughly analyzed whether the baby boom generation will follow the migration preferences of older cohorts. This research focuses on how the nexus of aging, migration, and income plays out for the older population, with a particular emphasis on the baby boom generation. The results show a distinct North-South disparity through spatial income redistribution due to elderly migration. We find that—in terms of net income gains—the winners of retirement migration are states located in the West and South, whereas the interior and the East Coast are losing net income. Older persons’ migration across interstate boundaries creates this stark income gain disparity because it is a highly selective process. Those choosing to move out of state are predominantly white, affluent, and better educated persons. Importantly, we also find a strong positive association between income and interstate moves for the baby boomers, but not for the WWII generation. The income selectivity and the associated spatial income redistribution will become stronger in the future when baby boomers become more and more dominant among the older population

This paper looks at the major changes in the French labour market since the 1960s. Over this period, the labour force has steadily increased, primarily owing to demographics (the post‑war baby boom). The labour force also saw increasing female employment, higher qualifications and a reduction in the length of working life at both ends. Three factors have driven changes in labour market trends in the last 50 years : economic globalisation, the emergence of ICT and development of automation, and the growth of the service economy, particularly financial services. For their part, employment policies have sought to “ enrich” the employment content of growth. After the 1974 break in the growth trend, the interaction of labour supply and demand led to rising unemployment and increasing diversity in employment statuses. The growth of short‑term and very‑short‑term contracts, as well as arrangements falling between salaried‑ and non‑salaried employment, illustrate a significant increase in employment precariousness., Marchand Olivier, Minni Claude. The Major Transformations of the French Labour Market Since the Early 1960s. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°510-512, Special Issue 50th Anniversary. pp. 89-107.

A disturbing trend in the world of public policy in recent years has been the extent to which fads and groupthink now shape public debates and galvanize support for ill-advised ideas and proposals. In the first phase of this process, someone — often a person of some notoriety, but not necessarily expertise — puts forth a new idea or claim, which is then amplified by a media increasingly focused on marketing the next new thing. Then comes a wave of articles, speeches, blogs, op-eds, and of course TED Talks, all providing supporting “evidence” and arguments for why the initial idea is the “best thing since sliced bread.” Voila: What begins as a loopy, even harmful, idea is now all the rage. Once this critical point of no return is reached — when “everyone” knows something is true — policymakers have only a short distance left to travel to turn what appears to be an inspired analysis into actual law. In the subcategory of science, technology, and innovation policy, there is no better case in point than today’s increasingly popular view that governments should increase taxes on capital equipment. Or, as the advocates say, “It’s time to tax the robots.” This idea has been around for a while, and gained considerable traction in 2017 when Microsoft founder Bill Gates argued, “At a time when people are saying that the arrival of that robot is a net loss because of displacement, you ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of that adoption somewhat.” After all, as a technology pioneer and billionaire, Bill Gates is anything but a tin foil hat-wearing Luddite. Since then, the calls for taxing those job-killing robots have become a veritable tidal wave. One can barely go a week without reading yet another article or comment on the topic. Robot taxers make three main arguments in support of their position: As this paper will show, all three arguments are wrong. At the end of the day, robot taxers are suffering from and contributing to a techno-panic over jobs. “Help!” they cry, “Robots are coming for our jobs! We can’t just eliminate any policies that support automation; we need to proactively erect barriers to it.” In fact, moving in that direction would be the worst possible thing for policymakers to do. Given that the U.S. economy has been in an unprecedented productivity growth slump for more than a decade, and the massive baby boom retirement wave is rising, economies desperately need faster productivity growth to have any hope of increasing after-tax wages faster than some minimal rate of growth. The last thing policymakers should do is reduce the incentive for companies to invest in new machinery and equipment, as that would slow down needed productivity growth. Instead, with first-year expensing provisions set to expire automatically at the end of 2022, one of the best things Congress could do to ensure strong growth in the future would be to make that provision permanent and then couple it with an investment tax credit.

The entry of baby boomers into the labor force in the late 1960s and 1970s slowed growth for physical and human capital per worker because young workers have little of both. Thus, the baby boom could have contributed to the productivity slowdown. I build and calibrate a model a la Huggett et al. (2011) with exogenous population growth, life expectancy, retirement and TFP to evaluate this theory. The baby boom alone accounts for 53% of the slowdown in the period 1964-69, 18% in 1970-74 and 6% in 1975-79.

Demographic change in Bangladesh is opening up new economic opportunities. As in many countries, declining infant and child mortality helped to spark lower fertility, effectively resulting in a temporary baby boom. As this cohort moves into working ages, Bangladesh finds itself with a potentially higher share of workers as compared with dependents. If working-age people can be productively employed, Bangladesh’s economic growth stands to accelerate. Theoretical and empirical literature on the effect of demographics on labor supply, savings, and economic growth underpin this effort to understand and forecast economic growth in Bangladesh. Policy choices can potentiate Bangladesh’s realization of economic benefits stemming from demographic change. Failure to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in demographic change can lead to economic stagnation.

On October 15 of last year, a retired school teacher from Earleville, Maryland, sat down at a computer terminal and typed responses to four “yes” or “no” questions, beginning with, “Are you at least 61 years and 9 months old?”In answering a¢ rmatively, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling made history. Born one second after midnight New Year’s Day, 1946, she was the …rst of the 78-millionmember baby boom generation to apply for Social Security bene…ts. She became eligible to collect with the turn of 2008. The reason Casey-Kirschling’s otherwise everyday act made news is no mystery. In part because there are so many baby boomers relative to the overall population, Social Security payments to retirees are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues in less than 10 years. By 2041, bene…ts will have to decline, or taxes or government borrowing will have to increase. In the case of Medicare, the health care insurance system for the American elderly, similar changes are expected to be necessary as early as 2019. The baby boom generation’s retirement brings into focus perhaps the most signi…cant demographic shift in United States history. Baby boomers, the moniker for the generation born between 1946 and 1964, comprise about 26 percent of the overall U.S. population. Their sheer numbers assure that future growth in the labor force will slow by comparison to recent decades. The birth rate seems unlikely to ever spike up to that experienced in the 1950s, and life expectancy continues to increase. In 1940, people who had already reached the age of 65 were expected to live to be 77.7 years. By 2030, life expectancy for 65-year-olds

As the baby boom cohort approaches retirement, there has been considerable uncertainty about the economic sustainability of the social security systems in most of the developed world. In recent decades, Spain has had both one of the oldest populations and the lowest levels of employment among the population aged 50 and over in Europe. This article addresses these issues by investigating the relationship between ageing and labour participation in the adult population. We examine the changes in employment exit patterns among men and women between 1999 and 2012, and the factors which influence early retirement, using the Spanish Labour Force Survey (panel dataset). We found clear gender effects in retirement behaviour in terms of the shares of the population who were not working and the predictors of early retirement. The partner is shown to be more relevant in the retirement timing decisions of men, while dependents are found to be more relevant in the decisions of women. Moreover, the likelihood of exiting the labour market early appears to be decreasing among women, and increasing among men.

Changing demographics across the world threatens the sustainability of pension benefits. Yet there is widespread sentiment among some business and policy analysts that in the presence of population ageing, more elderly people would mean more old-age consumption and robust business opportunities across all spending dimensions. In this paper we look at a micro-level analysis of intertemporal consumption/saving behavior, and find that in the presence of notable heterogeneity with respect to the consumer impatience and rationality degree, different demographic challenges and likely policy responses would imply greatly varying and significant consumption changes at old age. We also touch upon the associated issues of welfare analysis and transitional effects and discuss various complexities and challenges for policy implications and economic projections.

In this study, we construct a measure of human capital using micro datasets on labor composition of age, gender, education, and wage rate and analyze its role in economic growth for the Korean economy. Over the past three decades, human capital has grown steadily at about 1% per year, contrasting to a continuously declining trend of total work-hours. This growth has been driven by the rise of better-educated baby boom cohorts. A growth accounting exercise shows that human capital contributes significantly to economic growth; it accounted for 0.5% points of annual GDP growth over the period. Human capital is projected to remain a major growth factor over the next two decades as the increase in educational attainment continues. Increased employment rate of elderly or female workers reduces the aggregate human capital growth while increasing the available labor. Polices to improve human capital of less-productivity workers will help to support aggregate human capital and economic growth.

Over the past two centuries, the United States has witnessed dramatic changes in fertility rates and childbearing. This chapter describes shifts in childbearing and family size from 1800 to 2010 and describes the role of different factors in this evolution. Demand factors such as industrialization, urbanization, rising family incomes, public health improvements, and the growth in women’s wages generally reduced the benefits and raised the costs of having many children. Supply factors such as increases in infant and child survival and improvements in the technology of contraception and abortion have also altered parents’ decisions about their childbearing. This chapter summarizes the long-run trends in US fertility rates and completed childbearing, both overall and by mothers’ race/ethnicity and geography. Next, it evaluates evidence on the determinants of childbearing, including both economic and demographic explanations for these patterns. A final section weighs the evidence supporting the existence of two fertility transitions.

After peaking around the year 2000, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of Americans declined substantially, falling faster after the financial crisis of 2007. Since 2015, the LFPR has remained at its lowest in four decades. In this paper, we produce a comprehensive review of the literature investigating the causes of the recent decline in LFPR. We include works from the academic literature as well as the gray literature from research institutes and labor market experts, and published and unpublished studies. The literature reviewed signals multiple causes behind this decline. The research on the extent to which the Great Recession had caused the decline establishes that most of it cannot be attributed to cyclical factors. Additionally, the literature examines the relative importance of trend factors, such as long-running demographic patterns, which explain at least part of the decline. The review includes articles that aim to quantify the impact of one or more factors through statistical or econometric analysis or economic modeling. Demographic trends, like the aging of the Baby Boom Generation, explain a large portion of the decline. The rest of the decline can be attributed to factors that affect the participation rates of specific subpopulations, such as technological innovations and trade, as well as to changes in social programs, such as Social Security Disability Insurance. Some subpopulation trends are clear, but their ultimate causes are not fully understood, as is the case for female and youth LFPRs. We list these factors and point to important areas for future research.

As the baby boom generation begins to retire, more and more workers will have accumulated considerable assets in 401(k) plans and IRAs that have no particular method of payout. This paper examines the two basic, opposing methods that have been proposed as solutions to this problem. The first is the immediate life annuity, while the second is a fixed percentage of 4 percent of the initial account balance, increased each year after the first year of distribution by the rate of inflation. I calculate the lifetime income levels and risks these methods produce using a historical simulation of asset returns, interest rates, and inflation, as well as recent data on the pricing of immediate life annuities. I judge the life annuity an effective instrument to produce lifetime retirement income?generally somewhat better than the commonly used withdrawal rules. Because household needs and preferences are diverse, however, the government should not go beyond mild encouragement and education to promote the life annuity.

Bailey and Collins (2011) argue that Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke's (2005) hypothesis that the baby boom was partly due to a burst of productivity in the household sector is not supported by evidence. This conclusion is based on regression results showing that appliance ownership is negatively correlated with fertility. They also argue that the Amish, who limit the use of modern technology, had a baby boom. First, it is demonstrated that a negative correlation between appliance ownership and fertility can arise naturally in Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke's model. Second, evidence is presented casting doubt on the presumed technology phobia of the Amish. In Journal of Demographic Economics (2015), v. 81, no. 3: 317-329.

This paper reexamines the first viable and a still leading explanation for mid-twentieth century baby booms: Richard Easterlin's relative income hypothesis. He suggested that when incomes are higher than material aspirations (formed in childhood), birth rates would rise. This paper uses microeconomic data to formulate a measure of an individual's relative income. The use of microeconomic data allows the researcher to control for both state fixed effects and cohort fixed effects, both have been absent in previous examinations of Easterlin's hypothesis. The results of the empirical analysis are consistent with Easterlin's assertion that relative income influenced fertility decisions, although the effect operates only through childhood income. When the estimated effects are contextualized, they explain 12% of the U.S. baby boom.

In the context of the deep economic crisis affecting most western countries, but specially Southern Europe, some voices have claimed that Spaniards had been living beyond their means. In this paper, we try to shed some light on this issue by using National Transfer Accounts (NTA). We estimate the NTA for 2008 and compare them with the obtained previously for 2000 (Patxot et al., 2011a), obtaining interesting conclusions. The aggregated lifecycle deficit – difference between consumption and labour income – has increased from 8.8% of GDP in 2000 to 10.1% in 2008. The aggregated LCD evolution is driven on the one hand by the change in per capita profiles and, on the other hand by the change in population age structure. Along the observed period, the effect of population has been quite positive, due to the effect of migration, so that the economic support ratio has increased. In absence of population changes, LCD would have increased 2 percentage more points in terms of GDP. Nevertheless, the positive effect of population age structure is ending and the opposite effect is expected for the next decades with the baby boom retirement. Hence, our conclusion is that the levels of labour income and consumption by age observed in 2008 are not sustainable in the coming decades.

Long-term-care (LTC) costs are expected to significantly increase over the coming decades as the Baby Boom generation nears retirement. Recent policy discussions in the United State have focused on expanding the private LTC insurance market so as to alleviate some of the pressure on public programs. An important and fundamental input to the pricing of LTC insurance products is a set of age- and sex-specific functional status transition rates that can flexibly take into account alternative benefit trigger specifications. We apply generalized linear models to evaluate disability transitions for individuals in old age based on a large sample of U.S. elderly. We estimate a multistate model for LTC insurance applications and find significant differences in disability rate patterns and levels between our set of estimates and those separately estimated using an earlier approach developed by the Society of Actuaries. Our results suggest that the elderly face a 10% chance of becoming LTC disabled only at ages past...

How much might poor financial market returns affect the financial well-being of Canadian seniors? We compare three scenarios: if Canadian financial markets (a) never experienced the financial crisis of 2008 (i.e., continued on their pre-2008 path); (b) experienced the crisis and return to historical trends; or (c) enter a new low normal of depressed stock market returns and continued low interest rates. Using a population microsimulation model, we model the first order impacts—that is, before behavioural responses such as delayed retirement or increased savings—on the retirement income flows of Baby Boom retirees. While annual income from private savings of the median Canadian baby-boom senior drops by over half in the event of continuing low financial market returns, median financial welfare drops by only just over a fifth. Rising social transfers and stable income sources (such as Canada/Quebec Pension Plan and implicit income from home ownership) partially shield Canadian seniors from financial market risk. Canadian research has long recognized that the Canadian social pension system protects poorer Canadian seniors from destitution. Our results indicate that it also helps shield the Canadian elderly population as a whole from financial market risk.