eprintid: 10172
rev_number: 6
eprint_status: archive
userid: 1
dir: disk0/00/01/01/72
datestamp: 2009-12-11 12:19:18
lastmod: 2012-08-15 08:51:06
status_changed: 2012-08-15 08:51:06
type: workingPaper
metadata_visibility: show
creators_name: Irmen, Andreas
title: Population Aging and the Direction of Technical Change
ispublished: pub
subjects: 330
divisions: 181000
keywords: Demographic Transition , Capital Accumulation , Direction of Technical Change
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 aff ects 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. 
abstract_translated_lang: eng
class_scheme: jel
class_labels: O41, O33, D92, D91
date: 2009
date_type: published
id_scheme: DOI
id_number: 10.11588/heidok.00010172
schriftenreihe_cluster_id: sr-3
schriftenreihe_order: 0493
ppn_swb: 1649866666
own_urn: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-101722
language: eng
bibsort: IRMENANDREPOPULATION2009
full_text_status: public
citation:   Irmen, Andreas  (2009) Population Aging and the Direction of Technical Change.  [Working paper]     
document_url: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/10172/1/irmen_2009_dp493.pdf