Entrepreneurial aging and employment growth in the context of extreme growth events

This paper investigates empirical evidence on the linkage between entrepreneurial aging of the workforce and firm growth. More precisely, it aims to analyse the impact of aging on employment growth in the context of extreme growth events. Basically, the study is conducted to capture the overall impact of the average age structure and aging effect on employment growth. For the empirical estimation we apply a linked employer-employee dataset providing 2.100 German firms covering the time period from 2001 to 2006. Using quantile regression techniques, the specific quantiles θ of extremely growing (θ 0.90), medium growing (θ 0.50) or shrinking firms (θ 0.10) can be explicitly analysed. The results show, on average, that employment growth seems to decline as the workforce is getting older. Put differently, extreme growth events seem to be less likely when the average aging of the workforce rapidly accelerates. Firm-specific characteristics such as size, industry affiliation and location matter hereby.