Age discrimination in hiring: innovative experiments to identify barriers more thoroughly and to test solutions

One of the most pressing social and economic challenges is the population ageing. To address this challenge, governments have focussed on making work more attractive to older employees. However, scholars have shown that age discrimination is an important obstacle on the employer side. In this respect, identifying discrimination, which has been the focus in this literature, is relevant but the ultimate goal is to set a policy against unfavourable treatment of older job candidates. Therefore, we need to understand why and in what situations in particular age discrimination occurs. Moreover, there is a need for ‘solution-oriented’ studies, that test interventions to reduce age discrimination. That are the aims of this proposal. To this end, innovate experiments will be designed. For instance, we will merge correspondence field experimental data with administrative data and transpose the correspondence experimentation framework to the LinkedIn setting to study employer-side moderators of age discrimination. Moreover, we will rethink the vignette experimentation framework, that has been used to measure and explain discrimination to (i) investigate the effect of Belgian labour market schemes targeted to older employees on age discrimination and (ii) directly test alternative interventions to reduce age discrimination.