Organisational Change and Older WorkersTraining: Evidence from a Matched Employer-Employee Survey

In economies where labour forces are rapidly ageing, one policyrelevant question regarding technological and organisational innovations has to do with their labour-market consequences: do they a¤ect the structure of employment and, as a consequence, do they hurt the employment prospects of older workers? This study discusses and tests a set of hypotheses concerning the impact of organisational changes on the observed relative disadvantage older workers face in training opportunities. For this purpose I use an Australian matched employer-employee survey, AWIRS-1995, which has been uniquely designed to capture those technological and organisational change recently experienced by many other OECD economies. Drawing upon previous work on measures of technological change at the industry level I am able to overcome the endogeneity problem detected in other studies. Finally, di¤erently from the existing literature I distinguish between technological innovation and technological di¤usion. New and important …ndings of this study are that, although technological innovation at the industry level cause economic obsolescence among older workers, industry level technological di¤usion increases the chances of the oldest workers’training. Also, the expanded use of alternative employment arrangements (casuals and outsourcing) increases the training opportunities for workers aged 55 and plus and to a less extent, for workers aged 50 and plus. These …ndings suggest that there is ground for training and technology policies that reduce social exclusion, particularly in the face of substantially longer expected lives. JEL classi…cation codes: J24, J14, J28 Acknowledgments I thank Adeline Tubb, Shah Shah-Idil, and David Tan for excellent research assistance. Special thanks to AndrewWycko¤from the OECDResearch Group, who kindly provided the R&D data. I would also like to thank participants at the 2005 Australian Labour Market Research Workshop, Canberra, Australia, participants at the 2005 COE/JEPA Conference, “Towards a New Economic Paradigm: Declining Population Growth, Labour Market Transition and Economic Development under Globalization”, Kobe, Japan, December 17-18, 2005, and participant at the EALE conference 2006 in Prague. Financial support from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme (DP0559431) is gratefully acknowledged.