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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate empirically the relationship between workforce age, wage and productivity at the firm level.

Panel data techniques are applied to Belgian data on private sector workers and firms during 1999‐2006.

Results (robust to various potential econometric issues, including unobserved firm heterogeneity, endogeneity and state dependence) suggest that older workers are significantly less productive than prime age and young workers. In contrast, the productivity of middle‐aged workers is not found to be significantly different compared to young workers. Findings further indicate that average hourly wages within firms increase significantly with workers’ age. Overall, this leads to the conclusion that young (older) workers appear to be “underpaid” (“overpaid”).

These findings contribute to the growing literature on how the workforce age structure affects productivity and wages.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on work organization, performance and health.

The authors provide a general review of the literature and describe the main findings of the papers appearing in this special issue.

This issue provides new evidence regarding the impact of work organization (essentially defined in terms of payment methods, teamwork, workforce age structure and labour contracts) on performance (measured through employment, productivity and sickness absenteeism indicators). It also sheds more light on the determinants of workers’ health by gender, with particular attention to working conditions and mobbing.

The papers collected in this special issue provide some fine examples of recent work at the crossroads of health and personnel economics.