1 Do firms train older workers when they change? Evidence from a French linked employer-employee survey

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the impact of firms ’ technical and organisational changes on their employees ’ incidence of training varies with the age of the workers. To do this, we use 2006 COI survey which is the most recent French matched employer-employee data set on firms ’ organisational changes and computerization but also two others databases from government origin: the DMMO files and the “24-83 ” employers’ tax declarations. The final sample is an original statistical dataset obtained by merging these three data sources which allows us to deal with econometric problems such as endogeneity and selection effects. The capacity of older workers to adapt to an environment of rapid technical and organisational changes is crucial in the context of an increase of the employment rate of older workers. In fact, according to the so-called age-biased technological change hypothesis, the technological and organisational changes would lead to a reduction of the percentage of older workers in the workforce, particularly because of the depreciation of their human capital. Nevertheless, this argument is only partial since the employees ’ human capital evolves in response to these changes trough training. So, as Bartel and Sicherman (1993) point out, i