Aging and personal finance: a long-term behavior model of the Spanish population

Abstract

The aging of a population determines the characteristics of its economic environment and, according to the life-cycle hypothesis, it may affect the level of aggregate saving. Generally, the modeling of financial asset behavior considers factors of economic events and neglects the demographic approach. However, several empirical studies have found a high correlation between age distribution and stock prices. Based on those ideas, this empirical work aims at capturing the connection between the role that personal finance plays in individuals’ lifecycles and their demographic context. By means of an Error Correction Model (ECM), a cointegration analysis was conducted to visualize the stable, long-term relationship between the consumption of financial products and changes in the age structure of the population.

Keywords

• Population aging
• personal finance
• cointegration analysis