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This chapter presents and compares results from two studies that analyse the same research questions with different data sets. The first study analyses data on productivity at the level of work teams in one single plant. The tasks in this plant are rather homogeneous and age-productivity profiles can be estimated fairly precisely. But the results cannot be generalized to other parts of the economy. The other study analyses the Finnish Linked Employer Employee Data (FLEED), which provide information on productivity at the plant level for the Finnish economy. At this aggregate level, age-productivity profiles are obviously cruder. On the other hand, the results apply to a large part of the entire Finnish economy and can easily be generalized to other developed economies. The linked data also make it possible to compare productivity and wage profiles by age.

In this paper, we study the effect of skill-biased technological change on unemployment and wage inequality in the presence of a link between social benefits and average income. In this case, an increase in the productivity of skilled workers and hence their wage leads to an increase in average income and hence in benefits. The increased fallback income, in turn, makes unskilled workers ask for higher wages. As higher wages are not justified by respective productivity increases, unemployment rises. More generally, we show that skill-biased technological change leads to increasing unemployment of the unskilled and to a moderately increasing wage inequality when benefits are endogenous. The model provides a theoretical explanation for diverging dynamics in wage inequality and unemployment under different social benefits regimes: Analyzing the social legislation in 14 countries, we find that benefits are linked to the evolution of average income in Continental Europe but not in the U.S. and the UK. Given this institutional difference, our model predicts that skill-biased technological change leads to rising unemployment in Continental Europe and rising wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK....

Der Zusammenhang zwischen Alter und Leistungsfähigkeit von Beschäftigten wird in den verschiedensten Disziplinen untersucht - mit zum Teil recht unterschiedlichen Ergebnissen. Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die Literatur und diskutiert die Notwendigkeit einer neuen Sicht der Produktivitätsmessung. Bisherige Studien beschäftigen sich mit der Messung der individuellen Produktivität. In einer modernen arbeitsteiligen Gesellschaft realisiert sich die Arbeitsproduktivität allerdings weniger in der Einzelperson als vielmehr im Zusammenwirken von jüngeren (innovativen, flexiblen?) und älteren (erfahrenen?) Mitarbeitern.

This chapter investigates the shape and peak of the relation between age and productivity and under which circumstances specific age-productivity profiles exist. It starts by reviewing the main approaches used to estimate productivity by age: supervisors' evaluations, measuring the quantity and quality produced, analyses of large-scale employer-employee datasets and studies of age-earnings structures. Thereafter, it discusses potential causes of job performance variation by age, and how changes in abilities and health by age and variations in the workplace requirements are likely to alter age-variation in productivity over time.