abstract: 'Are employers willing to employ more older individuals, in particular

  older women? Higher employment among the older segments of the

  population will only materialize if firms are willing to employ them.

  Although several economists have started considering the demand side of

  the labour market for older individuals, few have considered its gender

  dimension properly; despite evidence that lifting the overall senior

  employment rate in the EU requires significantly raising that of women

  older than 50. In this paper, we posit that labour demand and

  employability depend to a large extent on how the age/gender composition

  of the workforce affects firm''s profits. Using unique firm-level panel

  data we produce robust evidence on the causal effect of age/gender on

  productivity (value added per worker), total labour costs and gross

  profits. We take advantage of the panel structure of data and resort to

  first differences to deal with a potential time-invariant heterogeneity

  bias. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production

  function estimation literature, we also address the risk of simultaneity

  bias (endogeneity of firm''s age-gender mix choices in the short run) by

  combining first differences with i) the structural approach suggested by

  Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2006), ii) alongside more traditional

  IV-GMM methods (Blundell and Bond, 1998) where lagged values of labour

  inputs are used as instruments. Results suggest no negative impact of

  rising shares of older men on firm''s gross profits, but a large negative

  effect of larger shares of older women. Another interesting result is

  that the vast and highly feminized services industry does not seem to

  offer working conditions that mitigate older women''s productivity and

  employability disadvantage, on the contrary. This is not good news for

  older women''s employability and calls for policy interventions in the

  Belgian private economy aimed at combating women''s decline of

  productivity with age and/or better adapting labour costs to age-gender

  productivity profiles. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.'
affiliation: 'Vandenberghe, V (Corresponding Author), Catholic Univ Louvain, ESL,
  IRES, Dept Econ, 3 Pl Montesquieu, B-1348 Louvain, Belgium.

  Vandenberghe, V., Catholic Univ Louvain, IRES, B-1348 Louvain, Belgium.'
author: Vandenberghe, V.
author-email: vincent.vandenberghe@uclouvain.be
author_list:
- family: Vandenberghe
  given: V.
da: '2023-09-28'
doi: 10.1016/j.labeco.2012.07.004
eissn: 1879-1034
files: []
issn: 0927-5371
journal: LABOUR ECONOMICS
keywords: 'Ageing workforce; Gender; Productivity; Profitability; Linked

  employer-employee data; Endogeneity and simultaneity bias'
keywords-plus: OLDER MEN; PRODUCTIVITY; PARTICIPATION; RETIREMENT; WAGES
language: English
month: JUN
number: SI
number-of-cited-references: '43'
orcid-numbers: Vandenberghe, V./0000-0002-1645-1127
pages: 30-46
papis_id: 541e4974a9821722a76249688edc1cc0
ref: Vandenberghe2013arefirms
researcherid-numbers: Vandenberghe, V./L-9544-2013
times-cited: '31'
title: Are firms willing to employ a greying and feminizing workforce?
type: Article
unique-id: WOS:000317704400004
usage-count-last-180-days: '0'
usage-count-since-2013: '58'
volume: '22'
web-of-science-categories: Economics
year: '2013'