Résumé

Population ageing puts pressure on the financing of social security systems. Incentives for human capital accumulation can however mitigate the negative macroeconomic impacts of population ageing. I add a new component to existing analyses, differences in labour supply elasticities across education classes. Assuming that learning ability and labour supply elasticities are independent, I show that population ageing depresses education incentives. Using an overlapping-generations model calibrated for Germany, I find that population ageing and associated social security reforms reduce the fraction of the population with higher education from 21.4% today to 18.8% in 2060. Such a drop in education requires government to generate an additional 1.3% of GDP of tax revenue to finance age-related social security expenditures. Removing skill biases in labour market regulation leads to more favourable impacts of population ageing on education incentives.

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