Complexity between Aging and the Structure of Financial Market: Empirical Evidence from Microdata

Abstract

By empirically testing the scale and structure hypotheses of aging’s impacts on the financial market using Tobit, FRM, and Heckman selection models, this paper proves that the number and proportion of elderly family members change the structure of families’ financial assets, though without significant effects on their overall size. Specifically, aging increases the share of cash and deposits in families’ total financial assets and decreases both the quantity and percentage of investment in risky assets. One more family member aged sixty and over, the risky assets decline by 5, 500RMB and its share decreases by 8.8 percent. A Heckman two-step model verifies the robustness of our results. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that aging plays different roles in different types of financial assets.

Aging population and digital inclusive finance, a natural experiment from china

“…As the population ages, the growing amount of population tends to be risk-averse and more likely to pay for real estate. Li et al's [54] empirical work found that real estate is a better investment option than other financial assets, as the aging population prefers lower risks. Li and his coauthors also show that the more the aging population a family has, the fewer risk assets the family hold and more real estate investment instead.…”