Muriel Roger

New Technologies, Organisation and Age: Firm-Level Evidence

We investigate the relationships between new technologies, innovative workplace practices and the age structure of the workforce in a sample of French firms. We find evidence that the wage-bill share of older workers is lower in innovative firms and that the opposite holds for younger workers. This age bias affects both men and women. It is also evidenced within occupational groups. More detailed analysis of employment inflows and outflows shows that new technologies essentially affect older workers through reduced hiring opportunities. In contrast, organisational innovations mainly affect their probability of exit, which decreases much less than for younger workers following reorganisation. Copyright 2006 Royal Economic Society. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Age Biased Technical and Organisational Change, Training and Employment Prospects of Older Workers

We analyse the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment prospects of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, we first estimate wage bill share equations for different age groups. As a second step, we estimate the impact of ICT, innovative work practices and training on employment flows by age group in the next period. Training appears to have a positive impact on the employability of older workers, but it offers limited prospects to dampen the age bias associated with new technologies and innovative work practices.

Heterogeneity matters: labour productivity differentiated by age and skills

This study aims at evaluating the actual profile of marginal productivity across the age groups within the workforce. As age-productivity profile might differ between occupations, we differentiate the workforce simultaneously by skills (low-skilled, high-skilled) and by age (young, middle-aged, old). Estimating a production function with a nested constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) specification in labour allows the imperfect substitution between different categories of workers. We use French dataset for manufacturing, services and trade sectors. Labour productivity is found to be the lowest for the low-skilled older workers while high-skilled senior employees in manufacturing and trade are the most productive group. Throughout the sectors, wage rates vary considerably less than productivity and wage profiles are steeper for high-skilled workers. The relative productivity over wage ratio is found to be sector-specific. It is the highest for young workers in manufacturing while in services and trade it is the highest for the mid-age employees.

Retirement, Early Retirement and Disability: Explaining Labor Force Participation after 55 in France

We analyze the influence of health and financial incentives on the retirement behavior of older workers in France, building upon Stock and Wise (1990) option value approach. The model accounts for three main retirement routes: the normal retirement, disability insurance (DI) and unemployment/preretirement pathways, and is estimated with a combination of microeconomic datasets that include the French data of the European SHARE survey. The estimates confirm that a decrease in the generosity of the pension and DI schemes induces people to stay longer in the labor market, and that people with better health tend to retire later. We present extreme situations simulating what individuals retirement behavior would have been if only one retirement route had existed and in the absence of constraints on work capabilities. We show that average years of work between 55 and 64 are nearly 14% greater when regular retirement incentives are applied to the whole population than when it is DI rules that are systematically applied.

Wealth and Income in the Euro Area: Heterogeneity in Households' Behaviours?

This article aims at linking the household wealth and income distributions for 15 European countries using the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. We study the role played by the household’s location in the income distributions in determining its location in the wealth distribution. A generalized ordered probit model is estimated to explain the role played by the position in the income distribution and by intergenerational transfers on the probability to be in a given wealth decile in each country. As expected, we obtain that a rise in income distribution or having received gifts and inheritances increases the probability to be in higher wealth deciles. Most importantly, we find evidences of heterogeneity in accumulation behaviours along the wealth distribution in France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Slovakia and Spain. The effect of income or inheritance on wealth accumulation varies, depending on the rank of the households in the wealth distribution. We also highlight some specificity in the top of the wealth distribution.