Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/30624 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 2888
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
An analytical framework is developed to study the repercussions between endogenous capital- and labor-saving technical change and population aging. Following an intuition often attributed to Hicks (1932), I ask whether and how population aging affects the relative scarcity of factors of production, relative factor prices, and the direction of induced technical change. Aging is equivalent to an increase in the old-age dependency ratio of an OLG-economy with two-period lived individuals. In this framework aging increases the relative scarcity of labor with respect to capital. Therefore, there will be more labor- and less capital-saving technical change. Unless there are contemporaneous knowledge spillovers across innovating firms technical change induced by a small increase in the old-age dependency ratio has no first-order effect on current GDP. The presence of capital-saving technical change is shown to imply that the economy's steady-state growth rate is independent of its age structure.
Subjects: 
demographic transition
capital accumulation
direction of technical change
JEL: 
D91
D92
O33
O41
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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