期刊名称：Discussion Papers / School of Business, University of New South Wales
出版年度：2007
卷号：2007
出版社：Sydney
摘要：In economies where labour forces are rapidly ageing, one
policy-relevant question regarding technological and organisational inno-
vations has to do with their labour-market consequences: do they a¤ect
the structure of employment and, as a consequence, do they hurt the em-
ployment prospects of older workers? This study discusses and tests a
set of hypotheses concerning the impact of organizational changes on the
observed relative disadvantage older workers face in training opportuni-
ties. For this purpose I use an Australian matched employer-employee
survey, AWIRS-1995, which has been uniquely designed to capture those
technological and organizational 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: (i) technological
innovation may indeed cause some skill obsolescence among older work-
ers; (ii) both the increasing extent of workplace restructuring and the
intensi.cation of technological di¤usion, brought by the tightening of the
input linkages between industries, contribute to explain a reduction in
the relative disadvantage that older workers experience in terms of train-
ing opportunities observed in the last few decades (OECD, 1998). These
.ndings suggest that there is ground for training and technology poli-
cies that reduce social exclusion, particularly in the face of substantially
longer expected lives.
