The age distribution is seldom taken into consideration in macroeconomic, and macro-econometric papers. This in spite of the fact that established economic theories predict that demographic factors will affect the aggregate economy. This paper focuses on economic growth and investigates empirically the influence of age variables on growth. Unlike other recent papers on the subject, the focus here is on annual data and individual countries, namely Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Estimations of a typical growth specification, augmented with age variables and other, more volatile, economic variables, are carried out, and results from these regressions seem to indicate that economic growth is indeed affected by the age distribution. The effect does not disappear when the specification is reestimated using an instrumental variable estimator in order to correct for the potential endogeneity of the economic variables. Since the age variables are highly correlated with each other, experiments with ridge regressions are also made in order to mitigate the collinearity which obscures the results when all of the age variables are included in the regressions.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Uppsala University, Department of Economics in its series Working Paper Series with number
1998:4.
Length: 27 pages Date of creation: 15 Jan 1998 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Regional Studies, 2001, pages 377-390. Handle: RePEc:hhs:uunewp:1998_004
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Phone: + 46 18 471 25 00 Fax: + 46 18 471 14 78 Email: Web page: http://www.nek.uu.se/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Katarina Grönvall).
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)