Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and the Heckman Critique

* Neumark: Department of Economics, University of California-Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697 (e-mail: [email protected]); Burn: Department of Economics, University of California-Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697 (e-mail: [email protected]); Button: Department of Economics, Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans, LA 70118 (e-mail: pbutton@ tulane.edu). We received generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We are especially grateful to Nanneh Chehras for outstanding research assistance. † Go to http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20161008 to visit the article page for additional materials and author disclosure statement(s). The “Heckman critique” of field experiments on labor market discrimination calls into question evidence from past studies, which generally point to discrimination in hiring. We use data on hiring of younger and older men from a new large-scale field experiment to assess this critique in the context of age discrimination. We find that correcting for the source of bias that this critique identifies can lead to different conclusions, in some cases eliminating evidence of age discrimination.