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"In recent decades, we have witnessed profound changes in family size and structure. While marriage rates and the number of children have declined in most industrialized countries, female labor force participation rates have risen significantly. However, while the working hours and wages of women have increased, we continue to observe huge discrepancies in market production by gender. This picture changes if we take unpaid household production, consumption, and caring into account. We find that, after applying this inclusive approach, the female lifecyle resembles male consumption, income, and transfer patterns. These findings have strong implications for future demographic change, as they suggest that the explicit policy aim of increasing female labor force participation could place constraints on the currently observed division of labor in the market and in the household." (author's abstract)

Population aging and longevity can pose challenges to the sustainability of fiscal budgets. This is of particular concern in Europe's rapidly aging welfare states offering generous social support programs for the elderly. Still, there are differences in the pace of ageing and the generosity of welfare states. We use public tax and benefit age schedules from the National Transfer Accounts project to estimate the impact of population aging on fiscal budgets of single countries and their implications for potential transfer flows in between European Union countries. We show the positive impact of changes in the economic life cycle by working longer and the impact of migration on the redistribution of transfers across Europe. We illustrate the crucial role that demography plays in deepening and reinforcing the fortunes of European finances.

Population aging is an inevitable global demographic process. Most of the literature on the consequences of demographic change focuses on the economic and societal challenges that we will face as people live longer and have fewer children. In this paper, we (a) briefly describe key trends and projections of the magnitude and speed of population aging; (b) discuss the economic, social, and environmental consequences of population aging; and (c) investigate some of the opportunities that aging societies create. We use Germany as a case study. However, the general insights that we obtain can be generalized to other developed countries. We argue that there may be positive unintended side effects of population aging that can be leveraged to address pressing environmental problems and issues of gender inequality and intergenerational ties.