Demographic change, migration and public pensions - a macroeconomic analysis
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Date
2018
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Abstract
This thesis contains three self-contained papers contributing to the literature on demographic change, migration and public pensions. Chapter 2 introduces the basic framework for analyzing endogenous migration flows in an open economy model where countries exhibit differences in the generosity of public pension systems. Chapter 3 expands the model setting along several dimensions. First of all, I extend the model from chapter 2 to a three-country set-up, in which Germany as the host region receives immigration from Poland and Southern Europe. Furthermore, I introduce a complex demographic structure enabling an explicit analysis of the demographic transition. In contrast to related quantitative macroeconomic studies of population aging, the endogeneity of migration flows introduces a feedback mechanism between demographic and economic variables. In particular, migration responds to changes in relative wages and relative returns to the public pension systems caused by population aging. The migration flows arising in general equilibrium alter country-specific population dynamics as well as macroeconomic aggregates, factor prices and social security variables. Finally, chapter 4 shifts the focus from the interconnection between migration and population aging to the distributional implications of current labor movements. In the context of a two-country model I study the case of Polish-German migration. I highlight two main channels through which migration entails distributional effects. Firstly, labor movements change relative wages as long as they amend a country’s skill composition. Secondly, due to return migration, the savings behavior of migrants differs from that of non-migrants. Specifically, if income differences between sending and host region are significantly large and migrants expect to return to their home country with a positive probability, they accumulate high per capita savings to insure against a possible drop in income after returning. These higher assets of return migrants unambiguously increase the capital intensity in Poland (sending country). Whether Germany (host country) also benefits from the migrants’ savings behavior depends on the degree of cross-border investments.
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Demographic change, Migration, Pensions, Macroeconomics