Too Old for This Job? Age Requirements in Job Postings and Their Impact on Applications and Hires

How strongly do employer age preferences restrict the hiring of older workers? I study Austrian job postings, in which employers could openly state age limits until the practice was banned in 2004. Age limits were both widespread and strict: more than 30 percent of vacancies stated an upper age limit, and most caps were set between age 40 and 55. To assess the impact of the ban, I link the vacancies to administrative data on applicants and hired workers, predict each job's age requirement from pre-ban postings of the same firm and occupation and compare jobs with stronger and weaker predicted restrictions over time. After the ban, previously restrictive jobs attracted older applicants and hired older workers, with larger effects at the application stage than at the hiring stage. Wages, job duration, sickness absence and vacancy filling duration remained unaffected. In the ad texts, employers replaced direct references to young workers with attributes commonly associated with youth. Taken together, these results suggest that employers hold overly pessimistic beliefs about older workers and partially revise them once a broader pool of applicants emerges.