The Baby Boomers and the Productivity Slowdown

Guillaume Vandenbroucke

No 2018-37, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: The entry of baby boomers into the labor market in the 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 1970s productivity slowdown. I build and calibrate a model a la Huggett et al. (2011) with exogenous population and TFP to evaluate this theory. The baby boom accounts for 75% of the slowdown in the period 1964-69, 25% in 1970-74 and 2% in 1975-79. The retiring of baby boomers may cause a 2.8pp decline in productivity growth between 2020 and 2040, ceteris paribus.

Keywords: Demography; baby boom; aggregate productivity; productivity slowdown; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J11 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2018-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-eff, nep-lab and nep-mac
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Related works:
Journal Article: The baby boomers and the productivity slowdown (2021)
Working Paper: The Baby Boomers and the Productivity Slowdown (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlwp:2018-037

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DOI: 10.20955/wp.2018.037

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