Explaining Age and Gender Differences in Employment Rates: A Labor Supply Side Perspective

2013

J Labour Market Res

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This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany using unique newly available data. We find that firms with a higher share of older workers have significantly lower proportions of R&D outlays in total revenues and of This paper is part of the project KombiFiD -Kombinierte Firmendaten für Deutschland that is financially supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). It is a joint project of the Institute of Economics of Leuphana University Lueneburg, the research data centres of the German Federal Statistical Office and the statistical offices of the German federal states, the Institute of Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency and the research department of the German Central Bank. While members of the KombiFiD-team from all institutions contributed to the construction of the data set used in this paper we alone are responsible for the study presented here and the conclusions drawn. We thank Alexander Vogel for help with the data and two reviewers for helpful comments. For details on how to access the KombiFiD data see www.kombifid.de. To facilitate replication the Stata do-file is available from the authors on request. Pfeifer thanks the VolkswagenStiftung for financial support. R&D employment in total employment, whereas firms with a higher share of female employment seem to be more active in R&D.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is innovative firm behavior correlated with age and gender composition of the workforce? Evidence from a new type of data for German enterprises

2013

J Labour Market Res

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“…This discrimination argument is in principal valid for all employees with profit sharing schemes and not only for owners, who are unlikely to have personnel contact with employees in larger firms. Another rationale based on labor supply considerations is that women are willing to accept lower wages due to lower reservation wages (Humpert and Pfeifer 2011) and less engagement in individual wage bargaining (Babcock and Laschever 2003;Bertrand 2010).…”

Section: Discussion and Concluding Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age and Gender Composition of the Workforce, Productivity and Profits: Evidence from a New Type of Data for German Enterprises

2012

SSRN Journal

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This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly available data that for the first time combine information from the statistics of employees covered by social security that is aggregated at the enterprise level and information from enterprise level surveys performed by the Statistical Offices. Our microeconometric analysis confirms previous findings of concave age-productivity profiles, which are consistent with human capital theory, and adds a new finding of a rather negative effect of age on firms' profitability, which is consistent with deferred compensation considerations. Moreover, our analysis reveals for the first time that the ceteris paribus lower level of productivity in firms with a higher share of female employees does not go hand in hand with a lower level of profitability in these firms. If anything, profitability is (slightly) higher in firms with a larger share of female employees. This finding might indicate that lower productivity of women is (over)compensated by lower wage costs for women, which might be driven by general labor market discrimination against women.

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“…The first finding indicates a potential problem for innovative firms (and economies) that are faced with an aging workforce due to the ongoing demographic change. The second finding shows however a potential strategy to solve this problem, namely to activate female labor supply, which is still not exhausted if we look at the lower employment rates and working hours of women compared to men -at least in Germany (e.g., Humpert and Pfeifer 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Innovative Firm Behavior Correlated with Age and Gender Composition of the Workforce? Evidence from a New Type of Data for German Enterprises

2012

SSRN Journal

Self Cite