Demography plays a large role in cultural evolution through its effects on the effective rate of innovation. If we assume that useful inventions are rare, then small isolated societies will have low rates of invention. In small populations, complex technology will tend to be lost as a result of random loss or incomplete transmission (the Tasmanian effect). Large populations have more inventors ...

Declining population as well as population aging has substantial impacts on the economy and on the society. By contrast, the size of the population usually does not matter for economic development, if it is stable; Switzerland and Sweden, for example, are rich countries with fewer than 10 million people. However, the process of declining does matter, particularly when it is accompanied by a sig...

Abstract Like many other countries, Germany has experienced rapid population and workforce ageing, yet with substantial variation across regions. In this paper we first use spatial between 1975 2014 to estimate quasi-causal supply effects of ageing on regional labour market outcomes, drawing the identification strategy Böhm Siegel (2020). We find in our panel German regions that mean age consid...