Who creates jobs and who creates productivity? Small versus large versus young versus old

This paper examines employment and productivity dynamics in the Swedish business sector during the period 1996-2013. In order to analyze employment and productivity in a consistent way we apply a novel implementation of a method, which previously has been used extensively to analyze job dynamics, on both job and productivity dynamics. Our results, based on detailed matched employer-employee data for Sweden, indicate substantial heterogeneity in terms of job and productivity dynamics for different types of firms. We find that most of the net jobs were created in young, small firms, but at the same time we also find that most of the productivity gains were created in large old incumbent firms, thus suggesting a division of labor between the two. Our analysis provides new insights into the importance of age and size of firms in the restructuring process, stressing the dichotomy between employment growth and productivity growth in different types of firms.