Crisis at 35: Middle Ageism in the Labor Market
Abstract: This paper investigates age-based hiring bias among employers, leveraging 4.4 million 4.4 million application records to 110,000 job ads from a leading online job platform in China. We address three empirical limitations in detecting discrimination when using an outcome regression approach. First, we exploit the quasi-random variations in the probability of a jobseeker's application being reviewed by the employer to resolve the selection bias concern. Second, our analysis focuses on employers' decision when only summary information about the jobseeker is displayed to mitigate the omitted variable bias. Third, to address the concern that an older jobseeker is fundamentally not comparable to a younger jobseeker, we apply an event-study structure to estimate jobseeker's success rate at each age from 26 to 55, in comparison to jobseekers 25 and younger, controlling for job ad fixed effects. We find robust evidence of age discrimination and observe an inverted U-shaped trend. The likelihood of being hired initially increases with age but immediately declines, with negative impact of age becoming significant when job seekers approach 35 years old, despite being within their prime working years. This "middle-ageism" effect is consistently present across industries and occupations, and disproportionately affects female workers more than their male peers.