Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment

NBER Working Paper No. 21669

Issued in October 2015, Revised in November 2017

NBER Program(s):Economics of Aging, Law and Economics, Labor Studies, Public Economics



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.

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Acknowledgments and Disclosures

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w21669

Published: David Neumark & Ian Burn & Patrick Button, 2019. "Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment," Journal of Political Economy, vol 127(2), pages 922-970.

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