Following the announcement of the success of projects CRIM-AI, coordinated by Professor Katalin Ligeti, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance and TSPQ, coordinated by Prof. Pierre Picard, FDEF is proud to announce that a third project has been selected to receive funding under the Luxembourg’s National Research Fund’s flagship grant programme, CORE.
The project, The Implications of Population Aging on Cultural and Socio-economic Outcomes or CULTURAGING, seeks to examine the socio-economic aspects of population aging. In order to address gaps in research that has, until now, been mainly focused on the role of population aging for economic growth, pension schemes, and social security, CULTURAGING will examine questions such as:
- Are aging societies more fair towards its members, young and old?
- How do aging societies decide about how to spend public money?
- Are aging societies more or less willing to accept immigrants in order to sustain public finances?
- How are aging societies voting? Do they go more for the political extremes as the old and the young have different needs? Or will they target for consensus?
- Are aging societies more willing to encourage the participation of women in the labor market? And if so, does this imply a change in the way people view women?
The output of the project is three-fold. Firstly, researchers will deliver a series of papers and associated datasets to be disseminated to the research community via participation in conferences, workshops, and via publications of the research output. Secondly, the project will provide an opportunity for young researchers to work with a highly active group of researchers, to get in touch with leading scholars in the field and to familiarise themselves with state-of-the-art research methods in an interdisciplinary field like the socio-economics of population aging. Finally, CULTURAGING will provide a new perspective on the important and largely ignored social implications of aging with a view to communicate clear messages to policy makers to help them formulate reasonable social policies required in an era of population aging.
Andreas Irmen, professor within the Department of Economics, is the project’s principal investigator. He will work in collaboration with his external partner Anastasia Litina, Assistant Professor at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece. The project will also hire one PhD candidate and two post-doctoral researchers. Professor David E. Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, will support the CULTURAGING team as an external collaborator.
The project, which will benefit from EUR 626 000 of external funding from the FNR, is set to begin in September 2021.
Read about the Faculty’s two other FNR-funded CORE projects here.