Under-50s have become a minority of voters, weakening younger citizens’ electoral weight. Turnout has fallen among under-50s while rising among older voters, further amplifying the mere impact of aging. Each new cohort enters the electorate less likely to vote and does not catch up later. Youth disengagement is strongest where population aging has advanced the fastest. Party manifestos have shifted toward issues that concern older voters, especially pensions and retirement.

Demographic shifts are reshaping the U.S. labor market, as the share of the population within the working age has begun to decline. This paper addresses the implications of this decline with a focus on within-firm dynamics. As longer lifespans and improved health lead more older workers to delay retirement, experienced employees are increasingly concentrated in high-paying managerial and leadership roles. The gap in management representation between workers over 50 and those under 30 has widened substantially over time, reflecting a growing age divide at the top of the wage distribution. While this greater availability of experienced workers can be beneficial for firms in the short-term, it can also generate “congestion effects” that can slow the advancement of younger cohorts. Reduced opportunities to move into high-paying and managerial jobs limit younger workers' earnings growth and ability to make key life investments, and this congestion constrains the development of future managerial talent. The authors argue that this divide is best understood as a shift in fortunes across generations, where gains from experience for older workers come at the cost of decreased opportunities for younger workers. As firms benefit from potential short-term productivity gains, they also neglect long-term investments in the next generation of the labor force. The central task for firms and policymakers is thus to ensure that the benefits of longer and more productive careers for older workers do not come at the expense of the dynamism and opportunities that younger workers need to thrive.

We study the effects of a unique Italian reform incentivizing voluntary tax compliance among the self-employed and small businesses. Starting in 2011, taxpayers in a growing number of sectors were promised an increase in audit exemptions upon achieving a set of desirable conditions defined by the Revenue Agency. While policy rewards might induce a tax base rise among previously non-compliant filers, curbing audit risks for broad categories of the taxpaying population might prove revenue reducing. Over the first six years of implementation, our event-study analysis of more than 9 million anonymized records reveals a substantial expansion of average declared revenues, total costs, and gross profits, with little heterogeneity across macro-regions. Although aggregate compliance does not seem to improve by policy metrics, our distributional analysis shows that large gains obtain among taxpayers appearing non-compliant in the year before their sector’s reform. We also provide a dynamic perspective on bunching at salient, audit-relevant revenue thresholds generated by the system. Relative revenue reshuffling from above and below these thresholds provide evidence that bunching in our context may emerge from both desirable and adversarial updating in compliance behavior.

In this paper we advocate for Ape (an early retirement option available to Italian employees) to become "structural". We claim that it responds to the need for greater flexibility in retirement, while maintaining the sustainability of the pension system over the long-run. Moreover, we discuss some proposals that would make it easier for potential beneficiaries to claim AdE, reducing the low take-up problem observed in the first months after its implementation.