Testing for Age Discrimination

A large scale field experiment – a correspondence study – will be used to collect the data needed to address two fundamental limitations of existing field experiments of age discrimination. The first limitation arises because the usual procedure in these studies of making older and younger applicants identical likely generates bias in favor of finding age discrimination. By providing a legal and “common-sense” basis for modifying the design of such an experiment to give older applicants commensurately more experience than younger applicants, this field experiment will yield evidence on the actual patterns of discrimination that older job applicants might face. The second limitation arises because greater unobserved differences in human capital investment of older applicants implies that existing field experiments are likely biased against finding age discrimination. This will be addressed by designing a field experiment that removes the effect of these unobservables, as in Neumark (2012).
Note: The “WISE-IZA” seminar series is transmitted from IZA in Bonn using e-conference technology.