The baby booms legacy: relative wages in the twenty-first century.

authors assess the baby boom generations impact on relative wages in the United States in the year 2020. Time series data for the period 1955-1984 from the MIT-Penn-SSRC data bank are used. An econometric model of the demand for workers in eight age-sex categories is estimated. The simulation results indicate that wages of prime-age workers will not deteriorate in relation to older workers as a result of the aging of the baby boom cohort. Conclusions for teens cannot be drawn. general result does not hold for women however. Prime-age women are predicted to lose in comparison with older workers and with men increasing rather than reducing wage differentials by sex ceteris paribus. (EXCERPT)