 Population Aging and the Direction of Technical ChangeNo 2888, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo 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. Keywords: demographic transition; capital accumulation; direction of technical change (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2888 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC. |
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