Abstract
Previous empirical studies on the effect of age on productivity and wages find contradicting results. Some studies find that if workers grow older there is an increasing gap between productivity and wages, i.e. wages increase with age while productivity does not or does not increase at the same pace. However, other studies find no evidence of such an age related pay-productivity gap. We perform an analysis of the relationship between age, wage and productivity using a matched worker-firm panel dataset from Dutch manufacturing covering the period 2000–2005. We find little evidence of an age related pay-productivity gap.
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The authors thank the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment for financial support; the estimates in this paper are based on own calculations using various micro datasets made available through a remote access facility by Statistics Netherlands. A preliminary version of the paper was presented in a labor-health seminar at Tilburg University and in seminars at Australian National University (RSSS—Canberra) and University of New South Wales (School of Economics—Sydney). We thank participant at these seminars as well as Sjef Ederveen, Jos Jansen, Henk Nijboer, Matteo Picchio, Daniel van Vuuren and two anonymous referees for comments on a previous version of the paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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van Ours, J.C., Stoeldraijer, L. Age, Wage and Productivity in Dutch Manufacturing. De Economist 159, 113–137 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-011-9159-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-011-9159-4