FAJ Jan Feb 2012 Demographic Changes Financial Markets and The Economy

January/February 2012 www.cfapubs.
org 23
Financial Analysts Journal
Volume 68 Number 1
2012 CFA Institute
Demographic Changes, Financial
Markets, and the Economy
Robert D. Arnott and Denis B. Chaves
Using a large sample of countries and 60 years of data, the authors found a strong and intuitive
link between demographic transitions and both GDP growth and capital market returns. Unlike
previous researchers, who used ad hoc and restrictive demographic variables, the authors imposed
a smooth and parsimonious polynomial curve across all age groups. They also performed robustness
checks and produced forecasts for the coming decade, with all the necessary caveats.
Demography is destiny.
Auguste Comte (17981857)
emography is one of the rare social sci-
ences in which forecastsat least for the
short runhave startlingly little uncer-
tainty. Todays 40-year-olds are next
years 41-year-olds. We can count them; we know
the likely mortality for 40-year-olds and the likely
rate of immigration and emigration for this age
cadre. Looking 10 years into the future, we can see
some uncertainty in the number of people under 10
and in the number of people over 70 (depending on
the progress of medical science), but surprisingly
little uncertainty in the number of people aged 10
70barring war, pestilence, or other catastrophes.
As the Baby Boomers have aged, many researchers
have studied past demographic data in an effort to
extract indications of the future influence of Boom-
ers on various aspects of the economy, from housing
prices to consumer preferences to retirement plans.
Although the genesis of our study has the same
rootscuriosity about the potential impact of
aging Baby Boomerswe decided to pursue a
broader course of study that spans decades of data
and dozens of countries. We concentrated on three
areas in which demographic shifts might influence
the economy: real per capita GDP growth, stock
market returns, and bond market returns.
We strove not to extend the theoretical rela-
tionships between demographic changes and
financial markets or the economy but, rather, to
apply new empirical techniques. First, we sought
to extract more statistical significance by looking at
data from many countries over many years. Sec-
ond, instead of fitting regressions against broad
and ad hoc demographic cohorts, we fit polynomi-
als to the regression coefficients between demo-
graphic age groups and both GDP growth and
stock and bond returns. The use of polynomials is
intuitive because it satisfies two important criteria:
parsimony (only a small number of parameters are
required) and continuity across age groups (behav-
ior should change reasonably smoothly from one
age cadre to the next).
Two core principles influenced our research
design. First, we deemed models for GDP growth
less interesting than models for real per capita PPP-
adjusted GDP growth.
1
All three of these modifiers
of GDP growth are important. After all, in a country
with 3 percent population growth, 3 percent GDP
growth means no growth at all for the average
citizenhence, our reliance on per capita data. The
same logic holds for 10 percent per capita GDP
growth in a country with 10 percent inflation
thus, our focus on real per capita GDP growth. The
PPP adjustment creates a fairer global comparison
by emphasizing the domestic purchasing power of
the average citizen for the consumption basket that
matters for each country.
2
Second, we measured stock and bond returns as
excess returns relative to domestic cash returns rather
than as simple annualized returns. We did so for two
simple reasons. Stock and bond excess returns over
cash can fairly be compared around the world
because arbitrage equalizes the returns for domestic
cash within relatively narrow bounds for the cur-
rency-hedged investor. In addition, by looking at
excess returns over domestic cash, we crudely but
reasonably effectively stripped out inflation differ-
ences: Cash yields rarely differ from domestic rates of
inflation by more than a couple of percentage points.
Robert D. Arnott is CEO and chairman of Research
Affiliates, LLC, Newport Beach, California. Denis B.
Chaves is a senior researcher at Research Affiliates, LLC,
Newport Beach, California.
D
24 www.cfapubs.org 2012 CFA Institute
Effects of Demographic Changes on
Financial Markets and the Economy
The relationship between per capita GDP growth
and demographic changes can be motivated by a
decomposition of per capita total output of goods
and services in an economy into age groups and
then into a product of per worker productivity and
per capita number of workers:
That a growing workforceor even a growing
population, for that mattershould be better for
GDP growth than a shrinking workforce seems
tautological. To isolate these effects, we can focus
on per capita GDP growth. In this construct, the
relevant measure becomes the size of the working-
age cadre (generally, people aged 2060) as a per-
centage of the total population: If the working-age
cadre is growing faster than the broad population,
that should provide a tailwind to real per capita
PPP-adjusted GDP; if slower, then our GDP mea-
sure should face a headwind.
3
This simple equation allows us to identify two
channels through which demographic changes can
influence a countrys GDP. First, let us assume that
productivity varies significantly across age groups.
As a large age group makes its way into the work-
force, then into the more productive stage of its life,
and subsequently into retirement, total per capita
output should first increase and then decrease. In
the demography literature, this effect is known as
a demographic dividend: Imagine the waves created
by a rock thrown into a lake and their paths as they
move away from the point of contact.
Second, anecdotal evidence tells us that most
entrepreneurs, inventors, and innovators are
young adults. For instance, Nobel Prizes are usu-
ally awarded to older scientists and researchers for
contributions made years earlier, when they were
much younger. Kanazawa (2003) found that the
productivity of scientists, musicians, and painters
peaks between 30 and 40the only exception is
authors, whose productivity tends to peak
between 40 and 50. Therefore, we would also
expect to identify a higher increase in productivity
across all age groupsand thus in total per capita
outputin countries with a relatively higher share
of younger cadres.
Another reason that young adults have more
impact on GDP growth than do middle-aged and
older adults is even simpler. Because we are using
growth rates in output as opposed to merely out-
put, the effects that we identify should peak at ages
considerably earlier than pre-retirement. A
workers contribution to total output likely peaks
when she has more experience, but her contribu-
tion to growth in total output is highest when she is
in the process of acquiring that experience.
4
For
each of us, the biggest jump in our contribution to
GDP occurs as we transition from nonworking ado-
lescents into gainfully employed 20-somethings.
Another, often smaller, jump in our contribution to
GDP occurs as we mature into our 30s. By our 40s,
the evidence of real wages would suggest that most
of us are at or approaching our peak contribution
to GDP, with a falling contribution to GDP in our
50s and 60s.
Either way, we would expect per capita GDP
growth to be strongest in populations dominated
by young adults and in populations in which the
young-adult population is growing quickly. This
circumstance is indeed the case for most emerging
economies and is assuredly not the case for most
developed economies.
Establishing a theoretical link between finan-
cial markets and demographic changes is a com-
plex task and would require more space than is
available here, not to mention that many excellent
papers on this topic already exist. Moreover, the
focus of our study was on trying to advance the
empirical side of the literature. Therefore, as a
motivation for our empirical analysis, we offer a
summary of the intuition and findings in the the-
oretical literature.
Brooks (2000), for instance, solved an
overlapping-generations model with forward-look-
ing agents, a risky asset, and a riskless one-period
bond. Various age cohorts trade with each other.
During baby booms, consumption is relatively
higher and savings relatively lower, effectively
pushing up returns on both stocks and bonds; dur-
ing population busts, the opposite effect dominates.
Moreover, agents shift their investments from
stocks to bonds as they approach retirement.
5
In contrast, the main argument made by skep-
tics of the demographic effects on financial markets
is that rational and forward-looking agents would
incorporate any slow-moving and predictable
changes in age distributions into their information
set and act accordingly. Thus, age effects would be
insignificant and, in practice, unobservable. To
address and dismantle this criticism, some
researchers (see, e.g., Abel 2003; Geanakoplos,
Magill, and Quinzii 2004) developed models to
explain how demography can affect stock and bond
returns even in the face of fully informed, rational
Total output
Population
Productivity per worker in age gr =
j
ooup
Number of workers in age group
Population
j
j |
\
|
.
|
.
January/February 2012 www.cfapubs.org 25
Demographic Changes, Financial Markets, and the Economy
agents. The intuition is simple, as explained by the
International Monetary Fund (2004) in its World
Economic Outlook:
This is because only living generations trade in
financial markets at a point in time, meaning
that differences in the demand and supply of
financial assetsa reflection of differences in
size across generationscannot be arbitraged
away ahead of time. (p. 151)
To summarize, the findings of most of these
models reflect common wisdom. Young adults,
often in the process of starting a family, will rarely
be major contributors to the quest for savings,
investments, and capital accumulation.
6
As they
look past their own and their childrens immediate
needs to their eventual retirements, they begin to
investfirst in stocks, then in bonds. As they slide
into retirement, they begin to sell assets in order to
buy goods and services that they no longer
produceeither directly, through their own
investments, or indirectly, through their pension
benefits. They tend to liquidate their riskiest assets
(stocks) before their less risky assets (bonds).
Review of the Empirical Literature
Analyzing the relationship between demographic
changes and the economy, whether qualitatively or
quantitatively, has been a topic of interest for cen-
turies.
7
Accordingly, summarizing all the relevant
research would be an impossible task. In this short
review, we focus on the recent literature, with an
emphasis on empirical tests, comparing it with our
own application of new methods to the data.
Mankiw and Weil (1989) conducted one of the
first studies to link demography and financial
assets. They showed a strong relationship between
the U.S. Baby Boom, the subsequent increase in
housing demand in the early 1970s, and a substan-
tial impact on housing prices over the next 20 years.
Their forecast that housing prices would decline
sharply after 1990, following the Baby Bust, did not
materialize on schedule, although demographic
effects may have magnified the recent collapse of
the housing bubble.
8
Arnott and Casscells (2003, 2004) discussed the
demographic changes that will likely occur in the
United States in the coming decades, explored their
implications for capital markets, and examined
possible solutions. Their important finding was
that the entitlements problem is not a financial
problem exacerbated by a failure to prefund these
obligations but, rather, is a support ratio problem
tied to demography, pure and simple: Prefunding
does not createin advancethe goods and ser-
vices that will change hands. Regardless of pre-
funding, goods and services must still change
hands, from those who produce the goods and
services to those who no longer do so. Arnott and
Casscells also speculated on the likely implications
for capital market returns, consistent with the
results that have subsequently been seen in the
United States, Japan, and parts of western Europe.
Finally, they examined and largely dismissed the
common arguments that immigration or produc-
tivity gains can offset the pressures associated with
pending demographic shifts.
Bosworth, Bryant, and Burtless (2004) surveyed
the literature on analyzing and forecasting prices
(returns) of financial assets and identified two
approaches. The first approach uses microeconomic
data on goods or asset holdings,
9
together with
forecasts of age distributions, to predict how future
demand and prices (returns) will evolve (see
Poterba 2001). For example, DellaVigna and Pollet
(2007, p. 1667) defined what they called age-
sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicycles, beer, life
insurance, and nursing homes, and estimated how
the demand for products or services in those sectors
will decrease or increase. They found that their
demand forecasts predict both profitability and
stock returns by industry 510 years in the future.
The second approachfollowed in our study and
surveyed by Davis and Li (2003)estimates the
direct time-series relationship between prices
(returns) and demographic variables. Notable stud-
ies in this strand include, but are not limited to, Yoo
(1994), Bakshi and Chen (1994), Lindh and Malm-
berg (1999), Ang and Maddaloni (2003), Goyal
(2004), and DellaVigna and Pollet (2007).
Yoo (1994) estimated multivariate time-series
regressions of annual U.S. stock, corporate bond,
and government bond returns on shares of total
population for the 2534, 3544, 4554, 5564, and
65+ age groups. His strongest results were a nega-
tive relationship between short- and medium-term
government bonds and the 4554 age group. The
statistical significance, however, was weak for
almost all coefficients in all five age groups. He
also estimated the regressions with three- and five-
year centered moving averages and found a signif-
icant increase in terms of both statistical signifi-
cance and fit, which supports our claim that long
horizons provide a better test for low-frequency
population changes.
Bakshi and Chen (1994) hypothesized that rel-
ative risk aversion is positively correlated with age
and modeled the utility function of the representa-
tive consumer as a function of aggregate consump-
tion and average age of the population. In their
tests, they used Euler equations and a two-factor
model based on consumption growth and percent-
age change in average age.
10
They found strong
support for their life-cycle risk aversion hypothesis
and a positive and statistically significant relation-
ship between U.S. stock excess returns and growth
in the average age of the U.S. population.
Using both a long sample (19002001; 5 coun-
tries) and a short sample (19702000; 15 countries),
Ang and Maddaloni (2003) studied the relationship
between excess stock returns (at one-, two-, and
five-year horizons) and log changes in three demo-
graphic variables: average age of the population
over 20, fraction of adults over 65, and percentage
of people in the 2064 age group. In pooled regres-
sions, their results displayed a strong and negative
effect for the fraction of retirees in the population
(65+). Interestingly, they found an opposite and
positive result in isolated regressions for the United
States and the United Kingdom. To explain this
difference in results, they conducted additional
tests and found that the effect for the 65+ age group
is stronger in countries with well-developed social
security systems and less developed financial mar-
kets. Finally, and most important for our study,
they also found that pooling data from five coun-
tries gives almost the same power as increasing the
sample size of the United States by five times (p.
10), which validates the strong results that we
found by using an extended sample of countries.
Using a sample of countries in the Organisation
for Economic Co-Operation and Development
(19501990), Lindh and Malmberg (1999) studied
the effects of log age group shares (1529, 3049, 50
64, and 65+) on five-year growth rates in GDP per
worker. They found significant and positive coeffi-
cients for the 5064 age group and significant and
negative coefficients for retirees (65+). With respect
to their choice of age groups, they commented that
the youngest age group, children aged 014, had
to be dropped in order to avoid high degrees of
linear dependency among the age variables. Some
arbitrariness in the definition of the age group vari-
ables cannot be avoided (p. 435). These concerns
raised by Lindh and Malmberg highlight the need
for an approach that uses all available information
and that defines the demographic variables less
arbitrarily and more systematically. Indeed, given
our findings, we wonder whether any study that
ignores young people could be important.
Our most important means of identification
and most significant improvement over prior
researchis our use of the econometric methodol-
ogy pioneered by Fair and Dominguez (1991).
They used a polynomial to analyze the relationship
between a changing U.S. age distribution and such
economic variables as consumption, housing
investment, money demand, and labor force par-
ticipation. This methodology, which forces the
regression coefficients on age groups into a poly-
nomial, has at least two advantages: (1) It permits
the inclusion of all age groups in the regression
while avoiding the statistical issues created by the
high correlation between them, and (2) the inter-
pretation of the results is more intuitive. In that
regard, we closely followed Higgins (1998), who
studied the effect of demographic changes on sav-
ings, investment, and the current account balance,
but we analyzed the implications for financial mar-
kets and economic growth.
In the empirical arena, Poterba (2001, p. 565)
lodged one of the strongest criticisms, maintaining
that statistical tests based on the few effective
degrees of freedom lack the power to find robust
evidence of such relationships in the time series
data. Because we agree with this statement and
recognize that demographic variables are both per-
sistent and slow moving, we took a number of steps
to increase the power of our tests:
1. Relied on five-year rates of GDP growth and
capital market returns instead of annual data
2. Controlled for starting valuation levels, GDP
levels, and business cycle measures so that the
demographic effects could be viewed in isola-
tion from these other powerful effects
3. Used a large cross section of countries
4. Included the information from all age groups
in the regressions, as previously mentioned
The result is a substantial improvement in the
statistical significance of our findings as compared
with those of prior studies of demographic effects
on the capital markets and GDP growth.
Data and Variables
We drew our data from many sources. The demo-
graphic and GDP data are deepest, with demo-
graphic age profiles and GDP on well over 200
countries from the UN and the Penn World Table,
typically well documented back to 1950.
11
The
stock and bond data are solid for only the devel-
oped economies and the largest emerging econo-
mies, with comparatively thin data before 1970.
Using nonoverlapping five-year returns or growth
rates, we were able to extract more than 200 obser-
vations in 22 countries for our main regressions and
more than 1,600 observations in 176 countries for
our extended group of countries.
We obtained population data by five-year age
cadres with a half-decade frequency from the UN
Population Division.
12
For most countries, the data
start in 1950 and include projections through 2050
in five-year intervals. For future years, eight differ-
ent variants are available to forecast combinations
of trends in fertility, mortality, and international
migration. For our forecasts for future GDP growth
and capital market excess returns, we chose the
medium variant available online, which assumes a
midrange expectation for fertility and normal
trends in mortality and migration.
13
We obtained our financial variables from vari-
ous sources, primarily Global Financial Data. We
complemented total return indices for stocks with
data from Claus Parum
14
(Denmark), the Central
Statistics Office
15
(Ireland), and Daniel Wydler
(1989; Switzerland). We proxied any missing 10-
year yields with 5- or 7-year yields and any missing
three-month yields with central bank discount rates.
We used measures of real per capita GDP from
Version 6.3 of the Penn World Table (see Heston,
Summers, and Aten 2009). This version includes
annual observations over 19502007 and assigns a
quality grade ranging from A (best) to D (worst) to
each country to signal the relative reliability of the
estimates (p. 18 of the Data Appendix).
16
Data
availability and reliabilitymissing observations
are mainly an issue with the financial variables
restricted our main sample to 22 developed coun-
tries,
17
of which 16 had a quality grade of A and 6
a B. Given the broad coverage of the population and
GDP data, however, we were able to conduct
robustness testswith respect to GDP growth
only, not stock or bond excess returnsfor a sam-
ple of 176 additional countries.
Our dependent variables are annualized, five-
year, nonoverlapping growth rates, denoted by r
i,t
and identified individually when necessary. Stock
and bond returns are in excess of the domestic
(same-country) bill return. Real per capita GDP
growth measures economic activity as the average
citizen might perceive it. Unlike most previous
researchers, we chose five-year returns, chiefly for
two reasons: (1) Demographic data are more
widely available in five-year intervals, and (2)
demographic changes occur slowly, giving low-
frequency data a better shot at identifying the
effects of interest in our study. The intersection of
data sources left us with approximately 200250
nonoverlapping observations in our main tests and
more than 1,600 in our robustness tests. This broad
database provided ample degrees of freedom and
delivered surprisingly strong statistical signifi-
cance for our results.
Our explanatory variables are the percentage
of total population by age group, , and changes
therein,
18
Our age groups range from 04,
, through 70+, , yielding a total of 15 five-
year demographic variables. We used dividend
yields (DY
i,t
), three-month yields (3M
i,t
), and 10-
year yields (10Y
i,t
) as control variables in our
regressions. Taking into account the initial valua-
tion (or stage of the business cycle) in our regres-
sions was vital, given that temporary swings in
prices or economic activity might affect the estima-
tion. For example, if stock market returns were
high following a high initial dividend yield, we
could not be confident that we were properly sep-
arating the demographic effects from well-known
valuation effects. Our demographic results, how-
ever, are relatively robust with regard to the choice
of the valuation measure. For instance, in one of
our robustness tests, we were forced to use the log
of the ratio of consumption to GDP, log(C
i,t
/
GDP
i,t
), given that interest rates for most countries
are unavailable.
In our view, these data are deep enough to
draw some important conclusions about past links
between demography, on the one hand, and GDP
growth and the capital markets, on the other.
Applying our results to predict the prospective
influence of demography on the economy or on the
capital markets is a bit riskier: Past is not prologue.
Nonetheless, although our confidence in the for-
ward links is weaker than our confidence in the
past links, the potential implications of our results
are sobering.
Results and Discussion
Ideally, one would like to estimate the joint effect of
all 15 age groups , j(04, . . . , 70+)or their
changes, , on stock and bond excess returns (or
on per capita GDP growth):
(1)
where X
i,t1
represents such control variables as
interest rates and valuation ratios. The problem
with this approach is that the demographic vari-
ables are highly correlated and would generate the
usual multicollinearity problems.
19
Moreover, in
our case, the estimation of Equation 1 is impossible!
Because the maximum number of nonoverlapping
five-year observations for each country (12 in 60
years) is less than the number of demographic
regressors (15 age groups), the covariance matrix of
is singular.
20
In the literature, the usual solution
is to include only a limited number of broad age
groups or to combine them in some ad hoc way
introducing a risk of data miningor to pool mul-
tiple countries with far too many independent vari-
ables, which still leads to unwieldy regressions.
We chose a different approach. Following Fair
and Dominguez (1991) and Higgins (1998), we
forced the demographic coefficients, b
j
, to satisfy a
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
.
( )
s
i t ,
0 4
s
i t ,
70+
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
r a X b s b s
i t i t i t N i t
N
i t , , , , ,
, = + + + +
( ) ( )
c
1 1
1
s
i t
j
,
( )
polynomial of order k, allowing us to incorporate
the information in the entire demographic profile.
See Appendix A for details of the methodology.
After imposing this restriction, we obtain k trans-
formed demographic variables, , whose coeffi-
cients, D
j
, can be estimated with
21
(2)
Because k ranges between 2 and 4 (discussed
later), this approach reduces the number of demo-
graphic variables. Equation 2 and its k polynomial
coefficients provide the ingredients for regression
diagnosis. The 15 implied coefficients by age group
in Equation 1 convey all the economic intuition.
Note that unlike the control variables, X
i,t1
,the
age group shares, , and their changes, , are
concurrent with the dependent variables. This
timing is important because we are exploring
demographic effects on financial assets, which pre-
sumably occur primarily via shifts in the demand for
financial assets. The same logic applies to our con-
current timing on GDP and demographic variables
because any demographic effects on GDP will pre-
sumably occur mainly via changes in the active pop-
ulation and their relative contributions to GDP.
Moreover, these data can be concurrent because we
know the demographic profile for each country over
the next 510 years with some precision, especially
for the future working-age and retirement-age
cadres, which we can simply count today.
In each case, the choice of polynomial degree
for the demographic variables strikes a compro-
mise between parsimony and statistical power.
Searching a large number of options is meaningless
because larger values of k provide no reduction in
dimensionality and also create a concern about
data mining. For these reasons, we entertained only
three options: polynomials of order k equal to 2, 3,
or 4. In other words, we limited our tests to qua-
dratic, cubic, and quartic polynomials. Because
models with lower degrees are special cases of their
high-degree counterparts, we relied on Wald tests
for nested models to gauge which order of polyno-
mial was most appropriate.
For simplicity and parsimony, in each regres-
sion we included only one control variable, X
i,t1
,
out of these three: dividend yield, 10-year yield, and
three-month yield. These variables play a central
role in the literature as forecasters of stock and bond
returns and of economic growth (see, e.g., Keim and
Stambaugh 1986; Campbell 1987; Ang, Piazzesi,
and Wei 2006). Demographic coefficientsthe
main point of interest in our studyare relatively
invariant to the choice of controls. Other alterna-
tives, such as yield spreads, produce very similar
results because demographic effects are low fre-
quency by nature and any variables that reflect
medium-term movements in prices or economic
cycles were effective in our study, wholly consistent
with prior research.
Some skeptics might argue that other factors
not included in the regressions could contribute to
growth in per capita GDP or stock and bond
returns. Our first response is that comprehensive
data for other variablesboth over time and across
countriespractically do not exist. Second, the
financial yields that we included in the regressions
served as controls or proxies for some of these
variables because lower initial prices reflect higher
risk aversion or higher risk premiums, among other
things. Third, the effects that we captured have a
low frequency by construction, making the argu-
ment for high-frequency variables, such as liquid-
ity, less plausible. Finally, we note that missing
variables always have the potential to alter the
results of any regression, but the various robust-
ness tests that we ran make us confident that our
results are not spurious.
We report a total of six sets of results for com-
binations of the three dependent variables (excess
stock and bond returns and growth in per capita
GDP) and the two demographic regressors (shares
of total population and their changes).
Demographic Shares. For the first set of
results, we used shares of total population by age
group, , as the regressors. Table 1 reports the
results from Equation 2, and Figure 1 plots the
implied polynomial coefficients for each of the age
cadres relative to Equation 1. The three columns of
Table 1 under Demographic Shares show coeffi-
cients and t-statistics for regressions using each of
our three dependent variables: five-year stock and
bond excess returns and five-year growth in per
capita GDP. We estimated all regressions by using
pooled ordinary least-squares (OLS) analysis and
included country dummies (or fixed effects) to con-
trol for any unobserved characteristics peculiar to
each country. We corrected standard errors for het-
eroscedasticity and cross-sectional correlation
(time clusters).
22
The coefficients of the dividend yield and the
10-year yield in the first two regressions are positive
and statistically significant, as is the case in most of
the literature: Higher yields signal high risk aver-
sion, depressed prices, and higher expected returns
for stocks and bonds. In the third regression, we
i t
j
,
r a X D D
D
i t i t i t i t
k i t
k
i t
, , , ,
, ,
.
= + + +
+ + +
( ) ( )
( )

c
1 1
1
2
2
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
( )
found a negative and statistically significant rela-
tionship between GDP growth and the three-month
yield. The intuition for this relationship is simple:
The Fed keeps the short yield at lower levels during
recessions, which are inevitably followed by peri-
ods of faster growth in GDP.
We begin the discussion of the demographic
results with the choice of k, the polynomial degree.
The last two rows of Table 1 present the p-values of
Wald test comparisons between cubic and qua-
dratic polynomials (k = 3 k = 2) and between
quartic and cubic versions (k = 4 k = 3). In the
regression for bonds, we can see that a polynomial
of the fourth degree is the best choice because both
tests strongly reject the null of statistical equiva-
lence between the nested models. In the case of
stocks, the choice is a cubic polynomial because the
tests cannot reject a difference between k = 3 and k
= 4 (a p-value of 28 percent). In the case of GDP
growth, a parabola is the best choice because both
p-values are above 10 percent.
The fit of all three regressions is relatively
strong, with R
2
s on the order of 30 percent. The
statistical significance of the demographic polyno-
mial coefficients is usually not as high as that of the
financial variables, yet most of the t-statistics are
close to or above 3. This outcome is expected
because most of the variation in prices and eco-
nomic activity occurs at a medium frequency and
is captured by the yields. Given the difficulty in
evaluating the economic significance and intuition
of the demographic effects in Table 1, we plotted
the implied coefficients for each age group in Fig-
ure 1, together with 90 percent two-sided confi-
dence intervals (shaded areas).
The graphs in Figure 1 and Figure 2 deserve
some explanation. Consider Panel A in Figure 1. The
solid line shows the implied coefficient that links the
size of each five-year demographic age cadre in the
population, as an independent variable, with the
corresponding stock market excess return for the
concurrent five-year span in the same country, as a
dependent variable. We can see a negative link for
Table 1. Regression Results, 19502010
Demographic Shares Change in Demographic Shares
Stocks Bonds GDP Stocks Bonds GDP
Dividend yield 3.39 3.38
(6.23) (6.30)
10-Year yield 0.66 0.62
(4.98) (4.07)
3-Month yield 0.15 0.19
(2.97) (4.14)
D
1
(1) 0.81 1.56 0.09 3.09 0.02 0.21
(1.63) (3.33) (3.77) (2.90) (0.04) (3.56)
D
2
(10) 1.69 3.47 0.07 10.27 1.83 0.14
(2.47) (3.10) (4.39) (3.57) (1.42) (3.51)
D
3
(100) 0.83 2.72 11.81 2.96
(3.05) (2.74) (4.25) (2.58)
D
4
(1,000) 0.69 4.22 1.17
(2.37) (4.77) (3.32)
R
2
28% 34% 30% 31% 30% 17%
Observations 203 241 255 203 241 255
Countries 22 22 22 22 22 22
k = 3 k = 2 0.3% 0.0% 25.7% 7.7% 3.4% 13.4%
k = 4 k = 3 28.4% 1.8% 12.4% 0.0% 0.1% 53.6%
Notes: This table reports coefficients and t-statistics (in parentheses) for six separate panel regressions,
one in each column. Standard errors are corrected for heteroscedasticity and cross-sectional correlation
(time clusters). The dependent variables are annualized five-year growth rates of per capita GDP, excess
stock returns, and excess bond returns. The demographic regressors are shares of total population, ,
in the first three columns, and changes therein, , in the last three columns. D
1
D
4
are the coefficients
of the polynomials that approximate the demographic coefficients. All regressions include country fixed
effects. The last two rows report the p-values of Wald tests for comparisons between nested models,
opposing a parabola and a cubic polynomial, and cubic and quartic polynomials.
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
Figure 1. Effect of Demographic Shares
0
Equal-Weighted Regression GDP-Weighted Regression
Implied Regression Coefficient
A. Stock Returns and Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
90 Percent Confidence Intervals
0
B. Bond Returns and Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
0
C. GDP Growth and Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
1
1
2
0.5
0.5
1.0
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.4
0.3
Figure 2. Effect of Changes in Demographic Shares
0
0
A. Stock Returns and Changes in Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
B. Bond Returns and Changes in Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
0
C. GDP Growth and Changes in Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
4
2
2
4
6
1.0
0.5
1.5
1.0
0.5
1.5
0.5
0.5
1.0
Equal-Weighted Regression GDP-Weighted Regression
the first six age cadres (029), with statistical signif-
icance at the 90 percent level for the three age cadres
from 5 to 19. This finding means that, excluding any
valuation effects based on the starting dividend
yields, a larger share of the population in these age
cadres historically conforms to lower stock market
returns (excess returns over cash). Note that this
polynomial hits a trough for the 1014 age cadre,
with a coefficient of 0.7, which means that a 1
percent higher concentration in this age cadre
results in 0.7 percent lower annual stock returns.
That is a big number for a 1 percent change in the
size of one five-year age cadre. These effects are
economically meaningful, especially considering
how fast the age structure is changing in most devel-
oped countries and that these results reflect annual
returns over five years. Note also that the coefficient
for the 70+ age cohort is slightly less than 1.5, which
is important in some of the faster-aging countries.
The OLS estimation implicitly assigned the
same weight to all countries in our sample. To
ensure that our conclusions held unaltered in larger
countries (e.g., the United States has a PPP-
adjusted GDP that is roughly 100 times that of New
Zealand), we estimated the same regressions by
using pooled weighted least-squares (WLS) analy-
sis. Weighting by GDP (the natural choice), how-
ever, would create the opposite imbalance.
Using the reciprocal of the Herfindahl Index
(HI) as a measure of the effective number of obser-
vations in a dataset, we found that our sample
shrank from 22 equally weighted countries to only
about 5 GDP-weighted countries.
23
Thus, we chose
to weight the regressions by the square root of PPP-
adjusted GDP, measured in 2005 international dol-
lars. This choice represented a balance and still left
us with 14 effective countries. The dotted lines
show the results for these regressions. That every
one of these lines in Figures 1 and 2 lies well within
the confidence bands for the equal-weight regres-
sions is reassuring. Thus, our first important robust-
ness test has helped confirm the merits of our results.
Comparing the three panels in Figure 1, we can
see that the most striking fact about the polynomi-
als is the similarity between the demographic
effects on stocks and bonds and, at the same time,
how different they are from the demographic
effects on real per capita GDP growth. Although
larger age groups in the early 20s clearly benefit
economic growth, they hurt the performance of
stocks and bonds. This effect may be due to the
relatively lower savings and higher debt levels of
young adults, perhaps in an attempt to smooth
consumption over their lifetimes (young adults
may be more rational than the older generation
thinks!). The opposite holds for the middle-aged
groups in their 50s, which affect GDP growth neg-
atively (already, even before they stop working!)
and financial assets positively: Apparently, pro-
ductivity starts to decline and savings to accelerate
long before retirement.
24
One common theme emerges from all three
panels in Figure 1: Large populations of retirees
(65+) seem to erode the performance of financial
markets as well as economic growth. This finding
makes perfect sense; retirees are disinvesting in
order to buy goods and services that they no longer
produce, and they are no longer contributing goods
and services into the macroeconomy. This effect is
less pronounced for bonds, presumably because
they are sold later in retirement than stocks, in
conformity with widespread financial advice.
Using the age group polynomials to estimate
demographic effects has several benefits. The first
benefit, as mentioned earlier, is the possibility of
estimating the joint effect of all demographic vari-
ables in the regressions, which allows us to use all
the available information in the age distributions,
even after imposing a (possibly) restrictive polyno-
mial structure on the coefficients. Second, instead
of using ad hoc age group selections as others have
done (e.g., 3545), we can use the resulting polyno-
mials to tell us exactly how to select and weight the
age groups in order to obtain the most powerful
explanatory variables.
One concern that afflicts other demographic
studies is the persistence ofsome might even sug-
gest a risk of nonstationarity in , the size of
each age cadre as a percentage of the population.
One answer is that these variables are limited to the
interval (0,1), but we also note the following:
1. We used 60 years of data for most countries.
Although this horizon might seem unimportant
in terms of demography, significant changes in
population structure occurred in most coun-
tries over 19502010. Indeed, Japan went from
being the youngest country in the developed
world to being the oldest, with its median age
doubling, from 22 to 44, in just 60 years.
2. With a large cross section of countries, we
increased the power of our tests by exploring
the varying stages in the demographic transi-
tion process experienced by various nations.
25
3. The polynomial curves show very significant
differences among the implied coefficients for
the various age groups (e.g., the coefficients of
younger and older cohorts have opposite signs).
This finding is a strong indication that the
empirical methodology also explores variations
across the age groups versus which
are arguably less persistent and more volatile.
s
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
m
,
( )
s
i t
n
,
( )
Changes in Demographic Shares. We repeated
the same analysis on changes in the demographic
shares of each age group, , which exhibit more
independence than the demographic shares, , both
relative to neighboring five-year age cadres and rela-
tive to prior and subsequent five-year spans.
26
Using
these alternative regressors, which largely avoid any
risk of nonstationarity, we found similar results, which
we hope will answer any remaining criticisms.
The last three columns in Table 1, under
Change in Demographic Shares, together with
the graphs in Figure 2, present the results for the
rates of change in each demographic variable,
The regressions for stocks and bonds have R
2
s that
are similar to those reported earlier, but we can see
a decrease to 17 percent in the case of GDP growth.
The degree of the polynomial is the same for both
bond returns and GDP growth; for stock returns,
however, the Wald test strongly favors a quartic
over a cubic curve (a p-value of zero). The magni-
tude and statistical significance of the financial vari-
ables are almost the same as in the previous tests.
Comparing the demographic coefficients with
those from the previous tests (the first three col-
umns in Table 1) reveals some interesting facts. The
demographic coefficients are similar in proportion
across the two regressions for GDP growth but are
noticeably different in the case of stock and bond
returns. To understand whether these changes
affect our intuition about the demographic effects,
we need to look at the implied coefficients in Figure
2. The magnitudes of the coefficients have
increased, roughly by a factor of 2, reflecting the
lower volatility of when compared with
The polynomials for stocks and bonds have the
same pattern as before but seem to shift to the right.
This finding makes intuitive sense because the peak
rate of change in the size of a given age cadre will
lead the peak size of that cadre leads
in most cases by as much as a decade or more.
27
Thus, the polynomial curves should exhibit peaks
at later ages for than for
Out-of-Sample Robustness Tests. We con-
ducted a third and more conventional series of
robustness tests by checking our hypothesis on a
new set of different countries. Unfortunately, apart
from the developed markets, there is a dearth of
reliable financial data beyond the data we used in
the previous tests. Nevertheless, the two main data-
sets in our GDP teststhe UN (population) and the
Penn World Table (national income accounts)
span about 200 countries. Thus, our robustness
tests were restricted to economic activity only;
stock and bond market data are simply unavailable
or too sparse to be useful.
To get around the lack of financial yields as
control variables, we used the log of the ratio of
consumption to GDP, log(C
i,t1
/GDP
i,t1
), as a proxy
for business cycles. Cochrane (1994) showed that this
ratio forecasts GDP growth because consumption is
nearly a random walk. Finally, there is also the
important issue regarding the quality of the data for
the remaining countries not used in our main tests.
Johnson, Larson, Papageorgiou, and Subramanian
(2009) showed that the vast majority of these coun-
tries have a quality grade of C or D (worst), as
assigned by the authors of the Penn World Table,
and that the standard errors of the estimates and the
likelihood of revisions are much larger for the
smaller countries and economies. Therefore, we
should expect wider confidence bands.
Many of these countries are very small, with
unreliable data and undiversified economies. We
thus followed our earlier approach and estimated
the regressions by using pooled WLS analysis,
whereby each country is weighted by the square
root of its 2005 GDP, measured in PPP-adjusted
international dollars. This approach assigns more
weight to larger economies and provides more
accurate estimates, without reducing the small
countries to irrelevance.
28
Table 2 shows that this sample includes 176
new countries and 1,640 observations. The depen-
dent variable (nonoverlapping five-year growth
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
.
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
.
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
.
( )
Table 2. GDP Growth Regression Results
(Robustness Tests), 19502010
Demographic
Shares
Change in
Demographic Shares
log(C/GDP) 1.67 2.02
(1.25) (1.58)
D
1
(1) 0.09 0.09
(4.29) (1.19)
D
2
(10) 0.07 0.31
(4.76) (2.15)
D
3
(100) 0.18
(2.49)
R
2
4% 3%
Observations 1,640 1,640
Countries 176 176
k = 3 k = 2 17.9% 1.3%
k = 4 k = 3 40.6% 40.3%
Note: This table repeats the per capita GDP growth tests in Table
1 with a different set of countries (see Table 1 for details).
rate in real per capita GDP) and the demographic
variableseither or are the same as
before, but we add log(C
i,t1
/GDP
i,t1
) as a substi-
tute for 3M
i,t
, which is unavailable in most of these
smaller economies. The statistical fit, as expected,
is much lower, with R
2
s at 4 and 3 percent. The
Wald tests recommend a parabola and a cubic poly-
nomial for and , respectively.
In the regression for (first column of Table
2), the demographic coefficients D
1
and D
2
are the
same as their counterparts in Table 1, up to two
decimal places. This finding is also confirmed by
Figure 3, which plots the corresponding GDP poly-
nomials from our primary tests (Panel C in Figures
1 and 2) as a dotted line. Panel A in Figure 3 depicts
a remarkable similarity between the two parabolas,
showing that our results with demographic shares
as forecasters also hold in a much larger sample.
The second regression has demographic coef-
ficients that differ from our main results, and so we
rely on the implied-coefficient profile in Figure 3 to
visually confirm a connection with the earlier
results. The general curve is broadly similar,
although less statistically significant. In Figure 3,
the comparison in Panel B is less precise than that
in Panel Athe dotted line for the primary GDP
model in Figure 2 falls mostly outside the 90 per-
cent confidence range for the polynomials in the
test depicted in Figure 3 (though largely within the
joint 90 percent confidence range on differences,
which is not shown).
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
s
i t
j
,
( )
Figure 3. Robustness Tests
0
Developing Countries Developed Countries
A. GDP Growth and Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
0
B. GDP Growth and Changes in Demographic Shares
04 70+ 2024 1014 4044 5054 3034 6064
Age Group
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.5
1.0
Figure 3 reveals the same positive relation-
ship between GDP growth and middle-aged
groups and the same negative relationship
between GDP growth and children and retirees.
In addition, the transition ages, or roots of the
polynomials, are only 10 years apart. One possible
interpretation of this result is simple: Most of these
countries are very poor and very young. Perhaps
a few additional oldsters might add stability and
patience to a demography that might otherwise be
fairly volatile!
29
Forecasts and Implications
What does the future hold? To state the obvious,
past is not prologue. Indeed, the assumption that
past statistical significance implies prospective
forecasting accuracy has been the downfall of many
quantitative models. So, we must share these indic-
ative results with this very important caveat: High
in-sample statistical significance does not guaran-
tee that these models can be trusted to predict the
future accurately. In these forecasts, we tacitly
assume that past relationships between demogra-
phy and GDP growth, or between demography and
capital market returns, will hold unaltered in the
future. The prospective scenarios that flow from
this work are entirely possible, but we dare not
assume that they are highly likely. Accordingly, we
should not view these daunting results as anything
more than a cautionary tale.
The number of factors that could affect the
outcomes of individual countries is too large to
even try to enumerate here, so our predictions
should be taken not with a grain but with a shaker-
ful of salt. Still, the combination of the thoroughly
researched projections by the UN Population Divi-
sion for the years ahead and the statistical signifi-
cance of our estimated relationships creates an
opportunity that is too tempting to resist. To the
best of our knowledge, our study is the first to make
systematic projections for GDP growth and finan-
cial markets on the basis of demographic changes
for practically every country in the world.
30
Our forecasts are based on Equation 2. Because
the regressions include country dummies, or fixed
effects, we can rewrite them as
(3)
Further, we used only the demographic variables
to construct our predictions:
(4)
where, for example, represents the time-series
average of r
i,t
for country i. These forecasts focus
singularly on the demographic component, setting
aside all starting valuation effects. Unlike yields
and interest rates, the population variables are pro-
jected by the UN far into the future, allowing us to
make extended forecasts.
All our predictions should be seen as abnormal
GDP growth or abnormal stock and bond returns.
These are deviations from long-term means relative
to past individual country performance. We chose
not to include in our forecasts for two reasons.
First, we could include them for only a small num-
ber of countries owing to data availability. Second,
the statistical precision around these historical
means is small, introducing even more uncertainty
into our figures. This decision means that compar-
isons across countries should be made carefully
and under the perhaps reasonable assumption that
nations have relatively similar long-term expecta-
tions for
Because the population data are in five-year
intervals, we calculated decade-long forecasts for
20112020 as the geometric average between the
forecasts for two periods: 20112015 and 2016
2020. For all our forecasts, we used the coefficients
in Table 1. In Figure 4 (GDP), Figure 5 (stocks),
and Figure 6 (bonds), Panel A depicts projected
demographic shares, , and Panel B
depicts changes in projected demographic shares,
Each figure contains two types of
graphs: color-coded maps showing results for all
countries and bar charts for the 22 developed
economies in our main tests. The bar charts also
provide a sense of scale for the color-coded maps.
The countries are first divided into positive (blue)
and negative (red) groups and then into three
subgroups, with approximately the same number
of countries in each subgroup.
We see two common themes in the developed
countries: negative values for GDP growth and
positive values for abnormal excess bond returns.
This finding is intuitive given their current demo-
graphic stage: A rising number of retirees com-
bined with low birth rates creates significant
pressure on output (negatively) and savings (posi-
tively). The net effect on excess stock returns varies
r r X X D
D
i t i i t i i t i
i t i
, , ,
,
=
( )
+
(
+
( ) ( )
( ) ( )

1 1
1 1
2
2 2
(
+ +
(
+
( ) ( )
D
k i t
k
i
k
i t
c
, ,
.
E E
E
t t
t
r r D
D
i t j i i t j i
i t j i
, ,
,
+ +
( ) ( )
+
( ) (
( )
=
(
+
1
1 1
2
2 2

))
+
( ) ( )
(
+ +
(
D
k i t j
k
i
k
E
t

,
,
r
i
r
i
r
i
.
E s
t i t j
n
, +
( )
(
E s
t i t j
n
A
,
.
+
( )
(
Figure 4. Annualized GDP Growth Forecasts, 20112020
(continued)
> 0.9% GDP Growth
0.4% to 0.9% GDP Growth
0% to 0.4% GDP Growth
< 1.8% GDP Growth
5 2 1 4 3 0
Abnormal GDP Growth (%)
A. Forecasts Using Demographic Shares
Norway
United Kingdom
Ireland
United States
New Zealand
Austria
Sweden
Belgium
Australia
France
Spain
Denmark
Switzerland
Canada
Portugal
Greece
Netherlands
Germany
Italy
Singapore
Finland
Japan
Figure 4. Annualized GDP Growth Forecasts, 20112020 (continued)
2.0 1.0 0.5 1.5 0
Abnormal GDP Growth (%)
B. Forecasts Using Changes in Demographic Shares
Greece
Norway
United Kingdom
Sweden
Italy
Portugal
Spain
Belgium
United States
Denmark
France
Germany
Switzerland
Australia
New Zealand
Finland
Austria
Japan
Ireland
Netherlands
Canada
Singapore
> 0.5% GDP Growth
< 0.9% GDP Growth
Figure 5. Annualized Stock Market Forecasts, 20112020
(continued)
8 4 8 4 0
Abnormal Stock Market Return (%)
Ireland
Spain
Singapore
Canada
New Zealand
Portugal
Greece
Austria
United States
Norway
Netherlands
Australia
United Kingdom
Switzerland
Italy
Belgium
France
Germany
Denmark
Sweden
Finland
Japan
> 9% Stock Market Return
4% to 9% Stock Market Return
< 2% Stock Market Return
Figure 5. Annualized Stock Market Forecasts, 20112020 (continued)
> 4.0% Stock Market Return
1.7% to 4.0% Stock Market Return
0% to 1.7% Stock Market Return
< 1.6% Stock Market Return
0.6% to 1.6% Stock Market Return
0% to 0.6% Stock Market Return
5 3 5 7 3 7 1 1 0
Abnormal Stock Market Return (%)
Greece
Italy
Spain
Portugal
Ireland
Germany
Belgium
Austria
France
United Kingdom
New Zealand
Switzerland
United States
Singapore
Australia
Norway
Canada
Netherlands
Sweden
Denmark
Finland
Japan
Figure 6. Annualized Bond Market Forecasts, 20112020
(continued)
0 3 4 5 6 1 2
Abnormal Bond Market Return (%)
Spain
Ireland
Singapore
Portugal
Greece
Canada
Italy
Austria
Netherlands
New Zealand
Germany
Australia
Japan
Switzerland
United States
Norway
Belgium
United Kingdom
France
Finland
Denmark
Sweden
> 4% Bond Market Return
2% to 4% Bond Market Return
< 2% Bond Market Return
Figure 6. Annualized Bond Market Forecasts, 20112020 (continued)
0 3 4 1 2
Abnormal Bond Market Return (%)
Spain
Ireland
Singapore
Austria
Germany
Greece
Portugal
Belgium
Italy
Canada
New Zealand
France
Switzerland
Australia
Netherlands
United States
United Kingdom
Norway
Finland
Denmark
Sweden
Japan
> 3.3% Bond Market Return
1.7% to 3.3% Bond Market Return
0% to 1.7% Bond Market Return
< 1.2% Bond Market Return
0.6% to 1.2% Bond Market Return
0% to 0.6% Bond Market Return
across countries; in a handful of cases, we also
found divergence between the two graphs in the
same figure, most dramatically for Singapore and
Germany. This divergence between the forecasts
with demographic shares and those with changes
in demographic shares is mainly due to unusually
rapid variations in some age groups, creating
extreme values for or , rela-
tive to their historical means.
31
These effects are
amplified in the case of stocks, given their higher
volatility and the relatively larger differences
between the coefficient profiles in Figures 1 and 2.
We do not favor one set of results over the other.
Not surprisingly, there is a much wider range
in the global forecasts. In the case of GDP growth,
the implied forecasts are bleak, with rare excep-
tions that include India and most African countries,
given their large working-age cohorts and very
small number of senior citizens. Bonds exhibit the
opposite results: Most of the aging world has a fast-
rising roster of middle-aged potential savers, lead-
ing to positive predictions for bonds, whereas
Africa presents mostly negative forecasts owing to
a large number of younger borrowers relative to
older savers.
We recognize that many of the emerging-
market results, for both stock and bond markets,
are hypothetical because many of these countries
do not have well-developed stock or bond mar-
kets. Still, these results are ever more relevant and
interesting as capital markets begin to take shape
in many of these countries.
The most interesting and extreme cases concern
stocks. Japan, Finland, and Sweden have a danger-
ous combination of very low birth rates and an
exploding number of retirees, giving them a strong
demographic headwind, which has been much in
the news lately. Our findings may add scientific
rigor to those discussions. The results for Canada,
the United States, and central Europe are mixed,
with slightly negative or positive projections,
depending on the measure used. The European
peripheryincluding Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and
Greecehas slightly better forecasts for stock and
bond returns, showing that there is hope for those
countries despite their recent troubles. Again, the
emerging economies present mixed results. Latin
America (including Mexico) and Asia fare relatively
well, with mostly positive returns. Much of sub-
Saharan Africa has too many young people and too
few savings-age adults for stock markets in the
region to fare well. Finally, the BRIC countries (Bra-
zil, Russia, India, and China) seem to have a bright
future ahead of them, at least for the next 10 years.
Conclusion
We studied the effect of demographic changes on
three measures of great importance for countries all
over the world: real per capita PPP-adjusted GDP
growth, stock market excess returns, and bond
market excess returns. We used an econometric
technique that had never been used for this pur-
pose; it allowed us to use all the available informa-
tion in population profiles by fitting a polynomial
curve on the regression coefficients of demographic
age groups. For our main regressions, we used a
large panel spanning more than 60 years and 22
countries (and 176 countries in some special cases).
By force-fitting a polynomial to our demo-
graphic variables, we extracted surprisingly strong
statistical significance, with implications that align
nicely with intuition. Children are not immediately
helpful to GDP. They do not contribute to it, nor do
they help stock and bond market returns in any
meaningful way; their parents are likely disinvesting
to pay their support. Young adults are the driving
force in GDP growth; they are the sources of innova-
tion and entrepreneurial spirit. But they are not yet
investing; they are overspending against their future
human capital. Middle-aged adults are the engine for
capital market returns; they are in their prime for
income, savings, and investments. And senior citi-
zens contribute to neither GDP growth nor stock and
bond market returns; they disinvest to buy goods
and services that they no longer produce.
We offered forecasts of GDP growth and of
abnormal stock and bond market excess returns for
almost every country in the world. With respect to
GDP growth, our projections are bleak for most of
the developed world. The developed countries
Japan, in particularhave alarmingly low birth
rates and high numbers of retirees. But the picture
is relatively bright for bonds and mixed for stocks,
especially for the younger of the developed econo-
mies. These forecasts must be seen for what they
arenamely, out-of-sample extrapolations of
some reasonably powerful in-sample relationships,
to be viewed as more cautionary than predictive.
Finally, we again stress that these are long-term
trends only, estimated by assuming past relationships
between demographic structures and measures of
economic growth and capital markets. Population
profiles change very slowly, and these forecasts are by
no means immutably bleak scenarios. The time to
respond gets shorter every year, but countries have
many tools to use in acting on these forecasts in order
to position themselves for more benign circumstances.
This topic is outside the scope of our article but could
certainly be the subject of many future studies.
This article qualifies for 1 CE credit.
E s
t i t j
n
, +
( )
(
E s
t i t j
n
A
, +
( )
(
Appendix A. Construction of
the Demographic Polynomial
The effect of each age group, , or changes
therein, , can be estimated with the following
regression:
(A1)
where r
t
is the rate of return on stocks or bonds, or
the growth rate in GDP, and X
t1
represents any
control variables, such as interest rates or valuation
ratios. We constrain the demographic coefficients,
b
i
, to satisfy a polynomial of order k:
(A2)
where i = 1, . . . , N. Substituting these coefficients
back into Equation A1 gives us
which we can rearrange as
(A3)
Note that the demographic shares add up to a
constant, or , at all points in
time. To avoid multicollinearity with the intercept
a, we impose the restriction on the demo-
graphic coefficients. Translating this restriction
into the polynomial coefficients, we obtain
Finally, substituting D
0
back into Equation
A3 shows us how to obtain the restricted coeffi-
cients of the demographic polynomial, D
j
, with
a regression:
We use Equation A2 to reconstruct the original
demographic coefficients.
Notes
1. Purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusts income or GDP to
reflect the cost of goods and services in an economy. If a high-
quality hotel room and an excellent dinner for four each costs
$30 in Urumqi, China, and a similar room and dinner each
costs $300 in Chicago, then a smaller GDP will buy more
consumer goods and services in Urumqi than in Chicago.
2. In other recent research, the suggestion has even been made
that GDP is a poor measure of prosperity. Arnott (2011)
spotlighted GDP net of deficit spending as a measure of
structural GDP and GDP net of all government spending as
a measure of private sector GDP. Both seem much more
relevant than traditional, debt-laden GDP. Although we
think it is a purer measure of national prosperity and
growth, we chose not to add this complication to our GDP
measure because it is not yet accepted by the broad main-
stream and would thus trigger controversy that would
distract from the main implications of our study.
3. This observation has direct relevance for the developed
world today. For roughly the last 50 years, the working-age
cadre has been growing faster than the overall population
by a quarter to a half percentage point a year. For most of
the developed world, this dynamic will be reversed for the
next 30 years. Should not this fact alone reduce the natural
per capita real GDP growth by about a half to a whole
percentage point a year relative to what we have learned to
expect? This simple fact has been overlooked by much of
the media and academia in their ruminations on our recent
inability to match the growth rates of past decades.
4. This observation is a sad acknowledgment for one of the
authors of this article as he endures his relentless decline in
his late 50s and relies increasingly on the innovative spirit
of younger adults like his coauthor, who is in his early 30s.
Our results might suggest that one of the authors is saving
and investing on the basis of the surging GDP contribution
of the other author. Neither author would entirely reject this
interpretation!
5. Brookss simulations show effects of around 1439 bps a
year, materially weaker than our empirical estimates and
forecasts. Nonetheless, the extensive literature on the equity
premium puzzle, summarized by Mehra (2008), shows that
market frictionsespecially borrowing constraints (see
Constantinides, Donaldson, and Mehra 2002)can exacer-
bate returns on risky and long-term securities.
6. Nor should they be. They will typically have far more
human capital than investment capital. Why invest at a
young age? Or, more provocatively, why not borrow
s
t
i ( )
As
t
i ( )
r a X b s b s
t t t N t
N
t
= + + + + +
c
1 1
1 ( ) ( )
,
b D D i D i D i
i k
k
= + + + +
0 1 2
2
,
r a X D s
D N s
t t j
j
j
k
t
j
j
j
k
t
N
t
= + +
+ + +
=
( )
=
( )
c
1
0
1
0
1
,
r a X D D is
D i s D i s
t t t
i
i
N
t
i
i
N
k
k
t
i
i
N
= + + +
+ + +
=
= =
1 0 1
1
2
2
1 1
( )
( ) ( )
+ c
t
.
s
t
i
i
N
=
=
1
1
As
t
i
i
N
=
=
0
1
b
i i
N
=
=
1
0
D
N
D i D i D i
i
N
i
N
k
k
i
N
0 1
1
2
2
1 1
1
= + + +
|
\
|
.
|
= = =
.
r a X D is
i
N
D i s
i
N
t t t
i
i
N
t
i
i
= + +
(
(
( )
=
( )
=
1 1
1
2
2
2
1
NN
k
k
t
i
k
i
N
t
D i s
i
N
+ +
(
(
+
( )
=
1
c .
against the future human capital in order to smooth out the
lifetime consumption expectations? Sadly, we seem not to
shake this pattern as we age, continuing to borrow and
spend even as our human capital dwindles.
7. In 1798, Thomas Malthus published the first of six editions
of his famous treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population.
He argued that the combination of linear growth in food
production and geometrical growth in population would
result in famine. Given the intervening two centuries of
rising population and rising per capita longevity and living
standards, his work is seen by many as discredited. Still, we
should acknowledge that his study was the first serious
examination of the connections between demography and
health or wealth. And some view him as merely being
earlyvery earlyin his prognostications.
8. Green and Hendershott (1996) objected to Mankiw and
Weils finding that housing demand begins to decline after
the age of 35. Researchers and commentators have also
pointed to a variety of possible causes for the surge in
housing prices in the last few decades before the recent
crisis: the Feds loose monetary policy, government housing
policy, lack of proper screening by lenders, and the mis-
management of financial risks spread by the use of deriva-
tives (collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps,
etc.). We also note that among our friends, the demand for
improved housing often continues well into the 50s.
9. The U.S. Federal Reserve Boards Survey of Consumer
Finances is a good example of a source of such data.
10. See Cochrane (2005) for an introduction to consumption-
based asset pricing, Euler equations, and factor models.
11. See http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/.
12. See www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.htm.
13. Other possible variants include low- or high-fertility trends,
mortality rates constant at 200510 levels, and zero migra-
tion as of 20052010.
14. See http://staff.cbs.dk/parum/.
15. See www.cso.ie/.
16. For a discussion of problems and concerns with this dataset,
see Johnson, Larson, Papageorgiou, and Subramanian
(2009).
17. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland,
France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Neth-
erlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the
United States.
18. By looking at shares of the population, which must always
sum to 1.0, and changes in shares, which must always sum
to 0.0, we tacitly chose to ignore overall growth rates. Thus,
we assumed that although overall population growth may
materially affect overall real GDP growth, it will not affect
per capita real GDP growth. This untested hypothesis is
worth exploring in future research.
19. For a detailed discussion of multicollinearity problems, see
Greene (2008).
20. Many of our readers are probably familiar with this issue
in the context of portfolio optimization. The availability of
data relative to the sheer number of assets in the investment
universe renders the estimation and inversion of covariance
matrices a challenge. A common solution is to adopt a factor
structure for the asset returns or their covariance matrix,
which is akin in spirit to the solution we used in that both
impose a limit on the number of parameters to be estimated.
21. A polynomial of order k is completely specified with k + 1
parameters, but because the demographic shares add up to
a constant, or , the methodology
imposes the extra restriction to avoid the perfect
correlation with the constant term in the regression. See
Appendix A for details.
22. Because the dependent variables are nonoverlapping
returns and growth rates, we believe that cross-sectional
correlation is the most important deviation from traditional
OLS assumptions. We also corrected for time-series corre-
lation (country clusters) and for both time and country
clusters, which resulted in small and occasional differences,
but our qualitative conclusions remained unchanged.
23. The Herfindahl Index is calculated as the weighted average
of individual weights, or It is widely used as a
measure of competition among companies in a country,
market, or industry and ranges between 1/N (perfect com-
petition) and 1 (monopoly). The reciprocal of this index,
ranging between N and 1, serves as an indicator of the
hypothetical number of equally powerful companies in a
country, market, or industry. If two countries have equal
weight, HI = 0.5, and so 1/HI = 2; with equal weighting, the
effective number of countries matches the actual number.
If two countries are weighted 90/10, the former utterly
dominates the regression and HI = 0.82; so, we effectively
have only 1.2 (1/HI) countries in our regression.
24. A controversial paradox in the field of demography stems
from the fact that economic growth seems to be unrelated
to the performance of financial markets (see, among many
others, Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton 2002). Our study may
help resolve this paradox. The age cadres that are most
associated with GDP growth are young adults; the age
cadres that are most associated with stock and bond excess
returns are middle-aged adults. The young adults help GDP
leap forward but are not yet serious about investing. The
middle-aged, aware of their approaching retirements, are
bidding stocks and bonds higher, but most are no longer
advancing rapidly in their careers, whereby they once
helped facilitate rapid GDP growth. Therefore, to the extent
that demography drives GDP growth or capital markets,
the impact is decidedly asynchronous, with about a 20-year
spread between peak impact on GDP and peak impact on
stock or bond excess returns.
25. Skeptics might argue that because most of the countries in
our sample are developed and thus highly correlated, we
were unable to conduct independent tests. We address this
point in two ways. First, we refer the reader to Ang and
Maddaloni (2003), who showed that using a sample of five
countries increased the power of their tests by almost the
same amount as augmenting their 20th century U.S. sample
by a factor of 5. Second, in checking for robustness (dis-
cussed later in the article), we extended our test for GDP
growth to other, less developed countries and found rela-
tively similar but noisier results (unsurprising, given the
lower quality of the data).
26. Note that a large age cadre larger than averagecan
be associated with positive change if it is rising
to its peak or with negative change if it is falling
from its peak.
27. The rate of change of an age cadre must be positive before
that age cadre can have above-average weight in the
population.
28. If we used equal weighting, China would have the same
weight as Kiribati. So, even though we would have 176
countries, we would have no confidence that our models
were relevant to the major markets. If we used GDP weight-
ing, then Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) would
compose almost half the sample. The effective number of s
t
i
i =
=
1
15
1 As
t
i
i =
=
1
15
0
b
i i
N
=
=
1
0
HI =
=
w
i i
N
2
1
.
s
i t
j
,
( )
As
i t
j
,
( )
>
0
As
i t
j
,
( )
< 0
countries is about 16 because of our heavy reliance on the
biggest countries. An inviting compromise is to split the
difference, using the square-root-of-GDP weighting:
Chinas GDP is 100 times that of Haiti, so it gets 10 times
the weight. The effective number of countries is about 75
because we rely on the smaller countries only lightly, and
yet BRIC still get a 14 percent weight vis--vis the 176
countries. With this compromise, we can have some confi-
dence that our models are useful for the major markets.
29. We acknowledge that this interpretation may be an ex post
rationalization of the modest differences between these
results and our core results.
30. Although we recognize that most countries do not have
well-established and well-functioning financial markets,
the questions posed here are still interesting because the
answers to them inform us about deeper aspects of the
population structure of various countries. For instance, one
can learn a lot about the demographic pressures on national
savings, investments, and productivity.
31. A plot of the population distribution for these two countries
(not reported here) reveals some very interesting proper-
ties. Germany was more affected by World War II than any
of its neighbors. Thus, although it will experience similar
developments in the 039 age group, the structural changes
in ages 40+ will be significantly different. Singapore has
experienced very intense migration, which gives it one of
the fastest-changing demographic structures in the world
across all age groups.
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