This paper gives a brief overview of China’s family planning policy which, although recently relaxed, still controls a large swath of the population. Unofficially known as the ‘one-child policy’, it resulted from the social strife of the 1970s coupled with a Malthusian pessimism concerning the capability of the still largely closed and isolated Chinese economy to care for itself. We discuss the...

Young People and the Great Recession This article reviews the effects of the Great Recession on youth labour markets. We argue that young people aged 16-24 have suffered disproportionately during the recession. Using the USA and UK as case studies, we analyse youth unemployment using microdata. We argue that there is convincing evidence that the effects of unemployment when young impose costs o...

I examine the e¤ect of age-distribution of the society on economic growth through technological progress. I build a multisector economy model that involves population pyramid. I characterize the steady-state of the model for low and high population growth rate. Higher population growth rate yields faster TFP and output growth in the long-run. I analyze dynamic behavior of the economy. I calibra...

Many studies specify human mortality patterns parametrically, with a parameter change affecting mortality rates at different ages simultaneously. Motivated by the stylized fact that a mortality decline affects primarily younger people in the early phase of mortality transition but mainly older people in the later phase, we study how a mortality change at an arbitrary age affects optimal retirem...

The paper deals with population ageing from demographic aspects. It is a general trend in human development. A new accelerated stage with shrinking labour force has been started. There is a redefinition of young, working-age and old-age groups. Trends in schooling, postponement in family formation, childbearing are connected also with ageing with this respect. The cohort ageing can also be defi...

We document that government spending multipliers depend on the population age structure. Using variation in military and birth rates across US states, we show local fiscal multiplier is 1.5 increases with share of young people, implying 1.1–1.9 interquartile range. A parsimonious life cycle open economy New Keynesian model credit market imperfections age-specific differences labor supply demand...

This paper examines the influence of business cycles in childhood on economic performance later in life. I relate unemployment rates between the year before one’s birth and the year of one’s fifteenth birthday to schooling, employment, and income as an adult. The analysis exploits variation in macroeconomic conditions across states over time. I address a number of identification challenges rela...

We show that changes in assortative mating patterns along the dimensions of age, ethnicity, religion and education are not responsible for the increasing marital instability over the last four decades in Austria. Without the rise in the age at marriage, divorce rates would be considerably higher. Immigration and secularization, and the resulting supply of spouses with diverse ethnicity and reli...

We investigate the use of various job search strategies and their impact on the probability of subsequent employment and the re-employment wage among working age men in Britain. We find that replying to advertisements and using Job Centres are the two most common methods of job search, and that job search intensity, and direct applications to employers in particular, result in a higher probabil...

Only 5.5 percent of black males married white females in 1990, and the family-income premium for intermarried black males was 7 percent. This paper estimates the impact of the mating taboo, courting opportunities, and individual endowments on the black male marriage market. Results indicate that eliminating the mating taboo would raise the intermarriage rate from 5.5 to 64 percent, and do away ...