women

women


Jim Feyrer has a paper from a few years back that looks precisely at the relationship of age structure and measures of productivity. What he finds is that the most productive group of workers are those aged 40-49. An 1% increase in the number of those workers (holding other age groups constant) is associated with about a 0.2% increase in productivity. Ages 50-plus imply lower productivity, but the statistical significance is low. Ages under 39, though, are significantly negative for productivity. Jim uses these relationships to partly explain the productivity slowdown in the US during the 1970s, when the Baby Boomers were filling up the labor force and were still under 40, meaning they were relatively low productivity.
But the results speak to this French question that Scott poses as well. By employing so few under 39-year-olds, France is essentially only using the very high productivity workers in the economy. Thus their GDP per hour is likely inflated by that fact, and their workers are not necessarily just as productive as those in the U.S. What you’d want is some kind of equivalent measure for the U.S. to make this concrete. What is the age-structure-adjusted GDP per hour worked in the U.S. and France? Based on Jim’s results, the U.S. would be ahead in that comparison.
This is related to the well-known result in labor economics that wages rise with labor market experience, but at a decreasing rate. That is, people’s wages always tend to rise with experience, but once you hit about 25-30 years of experience (meaning you are somewhere between 40-55 most likely, the increase gets close to zero. You can see a bunch of these wage/experience relationships in a paper by Lagakos, Moll, Porzio, and Qian, who compare the relationship across countries. One of the features of the data is that in rich countries (like France and the U.S.) the wage/experience relationship is really, really steep when experience is below 10 years. In other words, wages are particularly...

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