1 Firm productivity, workforce age and vocational training in Austria 1 Bernhard Mahlberg 2 Institute for Industrial Research, Austria and Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Research Institute for European Affairs Inga Freund and Alexia Prskawetz Vienna Institute of Demography, Austria To appear in: C. Ochsen and M. Kuhn. Labour Markets and Demographic Change. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden. (Forthcoming in summer 2008) Abstract Controlling for training effort at the firm level as well as for firm-specific characteristics we assess the relation between the firm’s productivity level and the age composition of its employees using a matched employer-employee dataset for Austria. Our aim is to test whether the hump-shaped age profile of the employees’ age structure on labor productivity that we found in previous studies is robust once we control for training intensity. We find a simultaneous, negative productivity effect of the share of young workers and older workers on labor productivity in samples of small as well as in samples of large firms. Furthermore it turns out that training intensity is an important variable for labor productivity. Keywords: Productivity, Ageing, Training JEL codes: J20, L20 1 The project has been funded by the Austrian National Bank under contract number ÖNB11621. The authors are grateful to the participants of the North American Productivity Workshop 2006, of the Annual Meeting of the German Demographic Association (DGD) 2007, of the "2 nd European Workshop on Labour markets and demographic change" 2007 and of the conference “Labor Market Flows, Productivity and Wage Dynamics: Ideas and Results from Empirical Research on Employer-Employee Linked Longitudinal Databases” 2007 for valuable comments and suggestions on first results of this study. Moreover, we would like to thank Statistics Austria for providing the data. 2 corresponding author, e-mail: Bernhard.Mahlberg@wu-wien.ac.at