We study whether older workers are costly to firms. Our estimation equations are derived from a variant of the decomposition methods frequently used for measuring micro-level sources of industry productivity growth. By using comprehensive linked employer-employee data from the Finnish business...

Analyses in this paper do not support the idea that job and worker flows have become more intensive and have deteriorated working conditions in the Finnish business sector. The magnitude of flow has in fact been rather stable since 1997. However, job flows are at a quite high level, as some 10%...