Impacts of Aging on Households Assets and Liabilities (in Korean)

This paper looks into the impacts of the progress of aging on the financial markets from the perspective of changes in households' asset and liability portfolios. To identify these impacts empirically, this paper sets up a hypothesis and conducts an analysis through a macroeconomic panel model using economic indicators from OECD member countries, and through a microeconomic panel model using Korean labor and income panel data. The results of empirical analysis show that, as the level of population aging increases, the household savings ratio and the share of households' investment in risky assets decline. The financial debt-to-financial assets ratio is found to fall as the level of aging rises, but this fall was statistically insignificant. In the microeconomic panel model, considering the cohort effect, the baby-boomer generation that experienced a period of high economic growth is found to have been able to build up more real and financial assets than the generations before them. In addition, the elderly are found to maintain their financial assets to some extent, rather than reducing them, owing mainly to the precautionary savings and bequest motives, while their real assets show modest downward movements. However, it is estimated that high-income elderly people, belonging to the fifth income quintile group, will reduce their real assets to repay their debts, hold financial assets for retirement savings, and so on. This paper is significant in that it verifies not only the impacts of aging on households' asset and liability structures but also the impacts of factors such as the retirement of baby-boomers in Korea through microeconomic panel data. This is expected to have implications for us in coming up with policy solutions related to aging.