Workshop on population aging

Workshop on population aging

Economists typically split to micro or macro. But an amazing team in Berlin -- Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, and Jonas Jessen in collaboration with Michał Myck  -- organized an amazing mix of both. Around the the ramifications of population aging in the data and in the models. It was a great chance to see what people are doing -- and they are doing some amazing stuff! And to present our own work on the link between the evolving age structure of the working population and unemployment. We build a large new Keynesian OLG model with a realistic age structure, labor market frictions, sticky prices, and aggregate shocks. We calibrated the model to the European economy. Using counterfactual simulations we show that demographic structure has substantially reduced unemployment rate in Euro zone. We also quantify the implications for optimal monetary policy: lowering inflation volatility becomes less costly in terms of GDP and unemployment volatility. Our findings yield important implications for the future evolution of unemployment given the anticipated further aging of the working population in Europe. Our findings also hint that optimal monetary policy may be more hawkish in an aging society.