Industrialized nations face the unprecedented demographic challenge that their societies are aging. Population aging is the result of considerable progress in health care and quality of life together with the decrease in birth rates that has started after the baby boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Since then, fertility rates have reached dramatically low levels and policies to turn around this trend are a hotly and controversially debated issue in most countries. Population aging poses fundamental challenges for economic policy and public funding of the welfare state, and policies that mitigate or neutralize these effects rank high on the economic policy agenda. There are essentially two sets of policies that help to master these problems. In the long run, removing the trend towards an aging population requires an increase in fertility. A first main goal of the subproject Population is to study the question whether family policies will have an impact on fertility and whether current policies – by affecting labor supply, labor demand, and earnings –help (or hinder) to improve the balance between work and childcare. In the short and medium run, immigration is an obvious instrument to ensure the presence of a sufficiently large labor force. A second main goal of the subproject Population is to understand how immigration affects take-up of welfare state provisions by immigrants and to study in more detail how immigration affects local labor markets.

Project Leader

		Zweimüller, Josef
		University of Zürich
		Population Economics
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Project Members

		Brunner, Beatrice
		University of Zurich
		Population Economics
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		Kuhn, Andreas
		University of Zurich
		Population Economics
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		Lalive, Rafael
		University of Lausanne
		Population Economics
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		Mayr, Karin
		University of Linz
		Population Economics
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		Wüllrich, Jean-Philippe
		University of Zurich
		Population Economics
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Publications