Just a couple of background papers on Finland. Firstly this working paper from Jaakko Kiander “The Evolution of the Finnish Model in the 1990s: From Depression to High Tech Boom“, and a paper from Francesco Daveri and Mika Maliranta: Aging, Technology and Productivity (which you can find in this working papers list).

You can find the abstract below the fold.

The possibly negative productivity counterpart of an aging workforce at times of fast technical change is often seen as an important policy issue. We use Finnish plant data constructed by linking various registers of firms, plants and individuals to test whether plants employing an older labor force have suffered productivity shortfalls compared to other plants during the 1990s through the early 2000s – the new economy period – while controlling for other plant productivity determinants, such as plant age, size and turnover rates. Our estimates indicate that this has not been equally the case in all industries. In the electronics industry, the seniorityproductivity profile at the plant level reaches a peak in the sixth year of tenure, but then productivity dramatically falls by a cumulative 40% in the following five years. The declining part of the curve is instead either absent or more delayed in time, and definitely less steep for the other manufacturing industries. The age-earnings relation is instead usually concave but stays upward sloping. The discrepancy of results for productivity and wages is consistent with Lazear’s theory of deferred payments. It also suggests that the practice of exploring the relation between plant or worker
characteristics and wages as if an age-productivity relation were investigated may be misleading.