Germany: employees’ productivity keeps increasing with age (Study)

11,000 employees followed for three years.  To carry out the study entitled “Productivity and age: Evidence from work teams at the assembly line”(see the full version in English below), the MEA’s researchers, Axel Börsch-Supan and Matthias Weiss, were lucky enough to use the internal statistics of the truck factory of Wörth, Daimler’s biggest factory for this type of production with nearly 11,000 employees.  The study lasted between 2003 and 2006 and looked at workers aged 25-65.  The researchers were not only able to rely on mistakes statistics but also on anonymous profiles from 3,284 employees, mentioning initial training, their internal advancement, their age and how long they had been in the company.  Working hours and procedures, as well as the nature of tasks on assembly lines, were both precise and standardized, so the researchers were able to draw up an extremely precise series of comparative data.