We’re delighted to announce Christian Dudel as this week’s guest in the Three Questions to Demographers series.
Dudel is the deputy director of the Max Planck-University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, deputy head of the Research Group Labor Demography and a research at the Lab of Population Health at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and a fellow of the Federal Institute for Population Research. His research interests include demography, sociology, epidemiology, and research methods. His work has been published in prominent journals such as Demography, Social Science Research, the International Journal of Epidemiology, Sociological Methods & Research, and many others.
Question 1) As a demographer, what do you have to say to current and future demographers about the topics that may become more relevant in the scientific field of demography in a few years’ time? What might they be?
Predicting the future relevance of research topics is difficult. It does not only depend on what we need to know as a society, or what we as researchers find interesting, but also on what is possible with the theories, methods, and data we have at our disposal. In demography, a lot of progress in recent years was driven by access to innovative data. This includes digital trace data, genetic data, and process-generated register data. While this data provides many new opportunities for research, it also has limitations. Currently, we are in a situation where we are starting to better understand what is possible with new data sources, and what promises might have been exaggerated. This means that in the next years we will see a consolidation of work with these types of data for some topics while others will become less relevant. Moreover, the increasing specialization we have been seeing in demography will most likely stay, and might even intensify.
For two of the fields I am active in, labor demography and fertility research, I think the following topics might become more important. In labor demography, causal inference will play an increasing role. For instance, we know well how trends and inequalities in the length of working life look. But we have little understanding what is causing them; and for most of the factors that we think could be important we cannot yet quantify their relevance. In fertility research, the interest in the fertility of men has increased considerably in recent years. The fertility of men differs from the fertility of women, and one cannot be inferred from the other. One key difference we have been observing in several high-income countries is that men on average tend to have fewer children than women, and they have a higher probability of staying childless. These findings might also hold in other contexts, and could be particularly pronounced in countries with strong gender imbalances in the population structure, such as certain countries in East Asia. If true, this would have potentially severe implications for these countries, as childless men, for instance, will have a smaller support network when they need help. However, currently we do not know to what extent this really applies, and more research is needed.
Question 2) How could you define Labor Demography for students at a very early stage of their studies?
Labor Demography is situated at the intersection of demography, sociology, economics, and occupational health. It is concerned with the interrelation of demographic processes and labor markets. For instance, demographic processes shape the size and composition of the workforce, while labor market trends strongly affect demographic outcomes. Understanding these associations is of key interest to policy makers to develop sustainable and equitable social policy. Topics we study in the Research Group Labor Demography at the MPIDR in Rostock include the consequences of population aging for labor supply and labor demand, the impact of (un)employment on childbirth, and the application of demographic methods to better understand labor market dynamics.
Question 3) The extension of working life has been proposed as a potential solution to the challenges of aging societies. In this context, what are the main challenges and opportunities associated with extending working life, both for workers and society, and what policies can be implemented to effectively support this transition?
In many countries around the world populations are aging. This puts pressure on societies in two ways: first, the economically active population is shrinking; second, the older population receiving transfers from the workforce through pensions and similar is increasing. Thus, there is both pressure on the income side and the spending side. Increasing the length of working life is often seen as a potential solution to this issue. If people work longer, they stay longer in the workforce and the lifetime they receive transfers is reduced. Built on this reasoning, many countries have implemented reforms aimed at increasing the length of working life.
As implied by the question, this comes with challenges and opportunities. A key challenge are inequalities in the length of working life, and in the labor market more broadly. Some population subgroups are already having a long working life, while others work less, often due to unemployment and due to health limitations. The first group can likely adapt well to policies pushing for a longer working life, while the second might not be able to extend their working life much further. This creates a high risk of them being left behind, and potentially suffering negative consequences for not working longer. Equitable social policies will need to take inequalities in the length of working life into account.
Working longer also provides opportunities. For instance, with increasing life expectancy comes increased population health, and more and more individuals are able to work beyond age 65 (the statutory retirement age in many countries). Staying in work, if voluntary, could potentially benefit well-being and further improve health, although the empirical evidence on this is currently mixed (Pilipiec et al. 2021).
Implementing policies to achieve extended working lives has been shown to be difficult. Increasing the statutory retirement age from 65 to later years will make some people retire at older ages, but age thresholds have been found to be surprisingly persistent, meaning that a sizable fraction of people still will leave the labor market at around 65 (Deshpande et al. 2020). Tying the retirement age to life expectancy, and thus making age thresholds dynamic, might increase inequality in the lifetime people spend in retirement (Strozza et al. 2024). Allowing flexible transitions in a wider age range, such as 62 to 68, in combination with financial incentives might have the unintended effect of people retiring earlier and not later (Leinonen et al. 2020). Overall, I believe this shows that most, if not all, policy options come with trade offs and potentially unintended consequences. This highlights the importance of careful monitoring when implementing policy changes.
References
Deshpande, M., Fadlon, I., Gray, C. How Sticky is Retirement Behavior in the U.S.? Responses to Changes in the Full Retirement Age. NBER Working Paper 27190 (2020). http://www.nber.org/papers/w27190
Leinonen T, Chandola T, Laaksonen M, Martikainen P. Socio-economic differences in retirement timing and participation in post-retirement employment in a context of a flexible pension age. Ageing and Society 40, 348-368 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X18000958
Pilipiec, P., Groot, W. & Pavlova, M. The Effect of an Increase of the Retirement Age on the Health, Well-Being, and Labor Force Participation of Older Workers: a Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Population Ageing 14, 271–315 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12062-020-09280-9
Strozza, C., Bergeron-Boucher, MP., Callaway, J. et al. Forecasting Inequalities in Survival to Retirement Age by Socioeconomic Status in Denmark and Sweden. European Journal of Population 40, 17 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-024-09704-8
For details: https://www.christiandudel.com/
We would like to thank professor and researcher Christian Dudel for participating in the Three Questions to Demographers series.
Demografia Unicamp 