Longevity and unemployment

Longevity and unemployment

The annual celebration of computational economics is in Nice this year. We present on Thursday, but greatly appreciate all the talks since Monday!

This paper studies the role of aging in the working population. The fertility rates have long been insufficient to maintain the working population age structure unchanged. Thus, although the working population is always "censored" at retirement age, the age of the average or median worker is growing incessantly. We face this fact with previously observed empirical regularities that relative to the prime age workers, the young workers are generally characterized by lower find rates and higher separation rates -- whereas the opposite is true for workers in ages shortly before retirement. This purely structural change would imply a mechanical decline in unemployment rates for demographic reasons alone. These changes are bound to instigate also general equilibrium effects. We construct a New Keynesian DSGE-OLG model to study this issue in a structured framework. We find corroboration to our intuitions, the unemployment rate declines by approximately 1 percentage point for this reason alone. We further explore the consequences for optimal monetary policy as well as sacrifice ratio.