Mathilde Esposito

Article de revue

Workforce Aging, Growth and Productivity

Mathilde Esposito, B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 553-593, 11/2025

Abstract In the literature on secular stagnation, demographic aging is widely blamed for lowering the IS curve of aggregate demand and therefore the natural interest rate. However, little is known about the impact of workforce aging on long-term aggregate supply, or so-called potential GDP. To fill this gap, this study delves into the effects of workforce aging on two key components of the remarkably sluggish potential GDP growth of developed countries: hours worked and labour productivity. First, using a novel macro-accounting decomposition of EU-KLEMS data, we find that old-labour input has the highest contribution to growth, through both increased hours worked and shifts in labour composition in the EU, US and Japan. Second, we use panel stochastic frontier models highlighting that, however, old workers have an adverse effect on labour productivity growth frontier – though increasing technical efficiency, i.e., reducing the distance to this frontier.

Keywords Labour productivity and EU-KLEMS, Stochastic frontier analysis, Labour Input, Potential growth, Demographic Aging

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Chapitre de livre

Demographic Winter, Economic Structure and Productivity in Japan

Gilles Dufrénot, Mathilde Esposito, Eva Moreno-Galbis, Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, pp. 206-242, 10/2025

Abstract Low fertility rates, mortality outstripping the birth rate, aging and pop-ulation contraction characterize a new demographic transition (the so-called “fifth stage”). This chapter seeks to evaluate how this phenomenon has impacted the Japanese economic structure and overall productivity. We extend Autor and Dorn’s (2013) theoretical framework to introduce two key mechanisms that have been at play since the 2000s: (i) a growing complementarity between goods and services consumption, and (ii) the substitution of older workers engaged in routine tasks with technological capital. The model predicts an increasing concentration of low-skilled workers in the service sector, which should aggravate productivity gaps between industry and services. Using stochastic frontier models and EU-KLEMS data, we compute industry-by-industry TFP growth frontiers in order to check if theoretical predictions match with Japanese reality.

Keywords Japan, Economic structure, Technological change, Productivity, Demographic transition

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