Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment / David Neumark, Ian Burn, Patrick Button.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Neumark, David.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Burn, Ian.

Button, Patrick.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21669.

NBER working paper series no. w21669

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

We design and implement a large-scale field experiment - a resume correspondence study - to address a number of potential limitations of existing field experiments testing for age discrimination, which may bias their results. One limitation that may bias these studies towards finding discrimination is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which they are applying, making them "otherwise comparable." The second limitation arises because greater unobserved differences in human capital investment of older applicants may bias existing field experiments against finding age discrimination. We also study ages closer to retirement than in past studies, and use a richer set of job profiles for older workers to test for differences associated with transitions to less demanding jobs ("bridge jobs") at older ages. Based on evidence from over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age. But we find that there is considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men after correcting for the potential biases this study addresses.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2015.