Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
965293 | Journal of the Japanese and International Economies | 2013 | 12 Pages |
Abstract
Human mortality data reveal that life expectancy in industrialized countries has been converging to a common value. Yet, significant variations in the distributions of adult life-table ages at death among some developed countries have also been observed. This paper, largely motivated by Japan's mortality data, presents a general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model that assesses the welfare effects of the mean-preserving declines in the variance of the distribution of adult ages at death. Our quantitative exercise reveals that for a given value of the economy-wide life expectancy, the individual welfare effects due to switching from high to low-variance steady states are length of life-dependent, quite sensitive to the average economy-wide retirement age, and strongly influenced by associated changes in the labor supply, factor prices, and lifetime earnings.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities
Economics, Econometrics and Finance
Economics and Econometrics
Authors
Emin Gahramanov, Xueli Tang,