International audienceAmid increasing interest in firm age and its effects on firm performance, this special issue offers an exhaustive review of the literature and a novel collection of evidence on the effects of firm age on performance, including a special focus of interest on innovation performance, financial performance, exports, survival and growth. This editorial positions the theme in the extant literature, and provides key definitions and challenges ahead in the field of evolutionary economics. It introduces the collection of articles composing the special issue. The papers offer a diversity of country contexts, as well as analytical approaches and methods. They include an exhaustive review of the literature on age and firms’ performance, and present original empirical studies focusing on the effects of age on firms’ economic outcomes on the one hand, and on innovation outcomes on the other hand. While most of the papers use econometric analysis, the level of analysis ranges from firm to individual

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The resilience of regional industries to economic shocks has gained a lot of attention in evolutionary economic geography recently. This paper uses a novel quantitative approach to investigate the regional industrial resilience of the Danish ICT sector to the shock following the burst of the dot-com bubble. It is shown that regions characterised by small and young ICT service companies were more adaptable and grew more than others, while diversity and urbanisation increased the sensitivity to the business cycle after the shock. Different types of resilient regions are found: adaptively resilient, rigidly resilient, entrepreneurially resilient and nonresilient regions.

The resilience of regional industries to economic shocks has gained a lot of attention in evolutionary economic geography recently. This paper uses a novel quantitative approach to investigate the regional industrial resilience of the Danish ICT sector to the shock following the burst of the dot-com bubble. It is shown that regions characterised by small and young ICT service companies were more adaptable and grew more than others, while diversity and urbanisation increased the sensitivity to the business cycle after the shock. Different types of resilient regions are found: adaptively resilient, rigidly resilient, entrepreneurially resilient and nonresilient regions.

This paper explores changes in the organisation of work in European nations over 2000-2010 show a decline in the Discretionary Learning (DL). Periods of economic expansion tend to be DL enhancing, while periods of economic stagnation tend to reinforce the use of more hierarchical forms of work organisation. More generally, the results show that cross-country comparisons do not provide a sound basis for drawing conclusions about how the evolution of national labour market policies impact on changes in work organisation over time within nations.

This paper analyzes what happens to redundant skills and workers when large companies close down and whether their skills are destroyed or reallocated. The analysis is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data of the closure of four companies. Getting a job in a skill‐related industry or moving to a spinoff firm leads to skill reallocation. Thus, the result depends on regional idiosyncrasies such as industry structure and urbanization. If local policy makers and the owners exert a coordinated effort, it is possible to create success stories of less skill destruction in urban as well as peripheral regions.

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Based on a unique dataset on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) among employees in Denmark, we investigate within-job relationships between AI use and skill requirements. We show that the effects of AI are varied and depend on whether AI is used for providing orders to humans or providing information for further human handling and in which occupation it is used. AI may enhance or augment skills through, for example, the increased use of high-performance work practices, or it may increase work pace constraints and reduce employee autonomy. The results imply that the diffusion of AI can increase inequalities in the labour market by augmenting skills used in high-skill jobs, although having relatively more adverse impacts on other jobs.We use additive noise modelling to establish the likely direction of causality in our results and find that the direction of causality is from AI use to skill requirements.