The impact of employer’s characteristics on the willingness to hire older workers: Evidence from a stated preferences experiment

This paper makes use of a vignette study to investigate employer’s willingness to hire older job applicants. We focus on the extent to which the hiring probability of older job applicants is related to various characteristics of the applicants, and simultaneously investigate the role of employer’s characteristics such as age and gender, and their assessment of older workers’ wage, productivity and skills compared to that of younger workers. The evidence indicates that the probability of being hired decreases substantially with the age of the job applicant.