Do State Laws Protecting Older Workers from Discrimination Reduce Age Discrimination in Hiring? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Does Ageist Language in Job Ads Predict Age Discrimination in Hiring?

We study the relationships between ageist stereotypes - as reflected in the language used in job ads - and age discrimination in hiring, exploiting the text of job ads and differences in callbacks to older and younger job applicants from a resume (correspondence study) field experiment (Neumark, Burn, and Button, 2019). Our analysis uses computational linguistics and machine learning methods to examine, in a field-experiment setting, ageist stereotypes that might underlie age discrimination in hiring. In so doing, we develop methods and a framework for analyzing textual data, highlighting the usefulness of various computer science techniques for empirical economics research. We find evidence that language related to stereotypes of older workers sometimes predicts discrimination against older workers. For men, we find evidence that age stereotypes about all three categories we consider - health, personality, and skill - predict age discrimination, and for women, age stereotypes about personality predict age discrimination. In general, the evidence that age stereotypes predict age discrimination is much stronger for men, and our results for men are quite consistent with the industrial psychology literature on age stereotypes.

Do Stronger Employment Discrimination Protections Decrease Reliance on Social Security Disability Insurance? Evidence from the U.S. Social Security Reforms

The United States Social Security Amendments of 1983 increased the full retirement age and penalties for retiring before that age. This increased Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications by making SSDI relatively more generous. We explore if state disability and age discrimination laws moderated these spillovers, using variation whereby many state laws are broader or stronger than federal law. We estimate the effects of these laws on SSDI applications and receipt using a difference-in-differences approach. We find that a broader definition of disability, where only a medically diagnosed condition is required to be covered under state law, along with being able to sue for more damages under state disability discrimination law, are both associated with a significant reduction in induced SSDI applications and receipts. We also find some evidence that some features of state disability discrimination laws are also associated with increased employment, especially for women. While we find some positive association between age discrimination laws and employment effects, we do not find any moderating effect of age discrimination laws on SSDI.

Responding to Disability Onset in the Late Working Years: What do Older Workers do?

This study uses occupational data from the Health and Retirement Study to document the link between disability onset and occupational transitions among older adults who are working and do not report a disabling condition at age 55. We find that one-quarter of workers go on to experience new disabilities before full-retirement age. Relative to their peers who do not report disabilities, stopping work and significant occupational changes are more common among workers who experience new disabilities. Our results suggest that policies to support labor force attachment might consider the importance of new disability onset and whether employer accommodations might help workers with new disabling conditions remain in the jobs they held when their health began to limit their work.

Do employment promotion policies affect employment or job transfer among older adults? Evidence from Japan

In most rapidly ageing industrialised countries, ageing problems have become an important social issue. In Japan, owing to the rapidly ageing population, the government has been intervening in both the demand side and supply side of labour to increase employment of older adults. This study examines labour supply responses to the increasing pension eligibility age and labour demand responses to company expansion and the abolition of the employee selection mechanism. This study is based on Japanese longitudinal survey data (Keio Household Panel Survey) from 2008 to 2018. Since employment law revisions and social security revisions are inextricably linked, one way to examine the effect of revisions to both simultaneously is to investigate them by cohort. The difference-in-difference model was used to compare revision-affected cohorts born between April 1953 and January 1956 and unaffected cohorts born between April 1949 and March 1953. It was found that the revisions had almost no impact on the employment of older adults and their receipt of pensions. However, they did have significant positive effects on job transfers and resignations. Hence, although the system was modified, it also gave companies the option of placing older adults in associated companies and of retaining some routes for older adults to retire, much as before the revisions.

Openness and COVID-19 induced xenophobia: The roles of trade and migration in sustainable development

Along with the plight of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 come the xenophobic behaviors and hate crimes against people with Asian descent around the globe. The threat of a public health emergency catalyzed underlying xenophobic sentiments, manifesting them into racial discrimination of various degrees. With most discriminatory acts reported in liberal societies, this article investigates whether an economy more open to trade and migration can be more susceptible to xenophobia. Using our first-hand survey data of 1767 Chinese respondents residing overseas from 65 different countries during February of 2020, we adopt an instrumental variable strategy to identify the causal effect of openness to trade and migration of their residence country on the likelihood of them receiving discriminatory behaviors during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our results show that greater openness to trade increases the likelihood of reported xenophobic behaviors, while openness to migration decreases it. On the other hand, stronger trade or immigration relationships with China are associated with less reported discrimination. And these effects primarily influence discriminatory behavior in interpersonal spaces, rather than through media outlets. Our findings highlight nuances of the effect of trade relations on the culture of a society.

How Are Employers Responding to an Aging Workforce?

The American population is aging and changes in the population's age structure are leading to an aging of the nation's workforce. In addition, changes to age-specific participation rates are exacerbating the aging of the national labor force. An important challenge for firms and organizations is how does workforce aging affect labor costs, productivity, and the sustainability of the organization. This article examines employer responses to workforce aging, including changes to retirement policies, modification in working conditions, adoption of phased retirement plans, and reforming other employee benefits.

Employment Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Evidence from a Field Experiment

We conducted an audit study - a resume correspondence experiment - to measure discrimination in hiring faced by Indigenous Peoples in the United States (Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians). We sent employers 13,516 realistic resumes of Indigenous or white applications for common jobs in 11 cities. We signalled Indigenous status in one of four different ways. Interview offer rates do not differ by race, which holds after an extensive battery of robustness checks. We discuss multiple concerns such as the saliency of signals, selection of cities and occupations, and labour market tightness that could affect the results of our audit study and those of others. We also conduct decompositions of wages, unemployment rates, unemployment durations, and employment durations to explore if discrimination might exist in contexts outside our experiment. We conclude by highlighting the essential tests and considerations that are important for future audit studies, regardless of if they find discrimination or not.