This special issue of The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, edited by Anita Mukherjee and APARC's Asia Health Policy Program Director Karen Eggleston, focuses on a key challenge around the world: financing the many needs that come with longer lives, lower fertility, and older population age structures. The triumph of longevity can pose a challenge to the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems and other social support programs disproportionately used by older adults. This challenge is a formidable but ultimately happy one, as people around the world today can expect to live longer and healthier lives.

The countries and regions studied in this special issue include many that are leading the world in this longevity transition with relatively old population age structures, especially in Europe and Japan. Other areas such as Latin American countries and especially China are rapidly catching up, or have large total populations of older adults at relatively low per capita income and little formal social security, such as India. 

This document is a memo from the "Global Populisms and their International Diffusion Conference" held at Stanford University on March 1-2, 2019.

This is a work in progress. DO NOT cite without checking with the authors first.

What makes an asset a “safe” asset? We study a model where two countries each issue sovereign bonds to satisfy investors’ safe asset demands. The countries differ in the float of their bonds and the fun-damental resources available to rollover debts. A sovereign’s debt is safer if its fundamentals are strong relative to other possible safe assets, not merely strong on an absolute basis. If demand for safe assets is high, a large float enhances safety through a market depth benefit. If demand for safe assets is low, then large debt size is a negative as rollover risk looms large.

We show that an information nudge increased the rate of American citizenship applications among low-income immigrants eligible for a federal fee waiver. Approximately half of the 9 million naturalization-eligible immigrants qualify for a federal programme that waives the cost of the citizenship application for low-income individuals. However, take-up of this fee waiver programme remains low^1,2,3. Here we use a randomized field experiment to test the effectiveness of a low-cost intervention (a ‘nudge’) that informed low-income immigrants about their eligibility for the fee waiver. We find that the information nudge increased the rate of citizenship applications by about 8.6 percentage points from 24.5% in the control group to 33.1% in the treatment group (ordinary least squares regression with robust standard errors (d.f. = 933); P = 0.015; 95% confidence interval ranged from 1.7 to 15.4 percentage points). We found no evidence that the nudge was less effective for poorer or less educated immigrants. These findings contribute to the literature that addresses the incomplete take-up of public benefits by low-income populations^{4,5,6,7,8,9,10} and suggest that lack of information is an important obstacle to citizenship among low-income immigrants who demonstrate an interest in naturalization.

I study the effect of taste-based discrimination on the assimilation decisions of immigrant minorities. Do discriminated minority groups increase their assimilation efforts in order to avoid discrimination and public harassment or do they become alienated and retreat in their own communities? I exploit an exogenous shock to native attitudes, anti-Germanism in the United States during World War I, to empirically identify the reactions of German immigrants to increased native hostility. I use two measures of assimilation efforts: naming patterns and petitions for naturalization. In the face of increased discrimination, Germans increase their assimilation investments by Americanizing their own and their children’s names and filing more petitions for US citizenship. These responses are stronger in states that registered higher levels of anti-German hostility, as measured by voting patterns and incidents of violence against Germans.

The 1940s and 1950s were a revolutionary era in both access to and imagination of the underwater environment in the most modernized nations of the globe. This article examines new possibilities in the exhibition of the underwater environment in film thanks to new dive and filming technologies. It focuses on how the depths are portrayed as a setting in Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), by the Disney studio, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s The Silent World (1956). In both films, conventions for portraying terrestrial settings are adapted to the resistant conditions of the aquatic environment. Such adaptation unleashes creativity in filmmaking and results in portrayals in which audiences are at once at home in this alien area of our planet and able to assimilate and enjoy its unprecedented vistas and savage life.

Repetition is constitutive of human life. Both the species and the individual develop through repetition. Unlike simple recall, repetition is permeated by the past and the present and is oriented toward the future. Repetition of central actions and events plays an important role in the lives of individuals and the life of society. It helps to create meaning and memory. Because repetition is a central aspect of human life, it plays a role in all social and cultural spheres. It is important for several branches of the humanities and social studies. This book presents studies of an array of repetitive phenomena and to show that repetition analysis is opening up a new field of study within single disciplines and interdisciplinary research. Recommended for scholars of literature, music, culture, and communication.

Linking individuals across historical datasets relies on information such as name and age that is both non-unique and prone to enumeration and transcription errors. These errors make it impossible to find the correct match with certainty. In the first part of the paper, we suggest a fully automated probabilistic method for linking historical datasets that enables researchers to create samples at the frontier of minimizing type I (false positives) and type II (false negatives) errors. The first step guides researchers in the choice of which varia-bles to use for linking. The second step uses the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, astandard tool in statistics, to compute the probability that each two records correspond to the same individual. The third step suggests how to use these estimated probabilities to choose which records to use in the analysis. In the second part of the paper, we apply the method to link historical population censuses in the US and Norway, and use these samples to estimate measures of intergenerational occupational mobility. The estimates using our method are remarkably similar to the ones using IPUMS’, which relies on hand linking tocreate a training sample. We created an R code and a Stata command that implement this method.