Summary
For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore I present empirical evidence at the firm level on the relationship between age, wage and productivity. In particular I address the potential wage-productivity gap that might occur at higher ages. I conclude that the productivity of older workers indeed decreases with their age. Nevertheless, the decline is limited. Furthermore, I find no evidence of a pay-productivity gap at higher ages.
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Acknowledgments
Excellent research assistance of Willemijn van den Berg and Lenny Stoeldraijer is gratefully acknowledged. The analysis of the age-wage-productivity relationship using matched worker-firm data is part of research sponsored by the Netherlands Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. I thank the Ministry for their generous financial support. The matched worker-firm data were made available through a remote access facility by Statistics Netherlands. I thank Paul van Seters for making his personal running data available for analysis. I also thank participants of the ESPE conference, workshops at University of Melbourne and Deakin University and Guyonne Kalb, Peter Kooreman and Daniel van Vuuren for their comments.
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The title is based on “When I’m sixty-four”, a song from the Beatles album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967). The paper is an extensive version of my Presidential Address at the European Society for Population Economics annual conference in Seville, June 12, 2009.
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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. Will You Still Need Me: When I’m 64?. De Economist 157, 441–460 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-009-9132-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-009-9132-7