Age and Cohort Change (ACC)

Age and Cohort Change research looks at the implications of an aging population for numerous aspects of society, including beliefs and values, work and retirement, and fertility

The Age and Cohort Change (ACC) group,  headed by Vegard Skirbekk, has established an extensive international collaboration with PEW for carrying out projections of beliefs and values. A close collaboration with BRILL publishers has been set up for a permanent online database to help distribute the data to the wider scientific community.

A chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Work and Aging, authored by Vegard Skirbekk, Elke Loichinger, and Bilal Barakat, was published in 2012. It is a review of projections of the size and age profile of European populations as a starting point for an investigation of different scenarios of retirement arrangements. The paper shows that there is room in many European countries for retirement policies which encourage a longer working life. Even a moderate increase in the effective retirement age will in many cases stabilize old-age dependency ratios in many European countries.

Vegard Skirbekk and Samir KC published an article in Asian Population Studies which shows that unlike most other determinants of social status, education causes a significant delay in fertility timing and depresses fertility outcomes. It also operates as a self-reinforcing status-seeking spiral mechanism, with important consequences for aggregate fertility over time. Later-born cohorts of women, in order to maintain a given position in the education distribution compared to their same-age peers, must attain increasingly higher levels of education. This implies that the process of status-seeking is having increasingly strong effects in terms of reducing global fertility levels. This can be particularly important for Asian nations where schooling levels have risen rapidly in recent decades and increase in the ages at childbearing and depression of fertility outcomes were noticed.

ACC results and publications have been widely covered in international media including The Economist and the New York Times. Vegard Skirbekk has been awarded a Professorship at Jacobs University in Bremen. 


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Last edited: 15 October 2013

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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