An empirical study of age discrimination in Norway and Germany

Abstract

Using a questionnaire and a sample of students and personnel managers we establish the existence of age discrimination in the hiring process in Germany and Norway. As expected, age discrimination is more prominent in Germany where the hiring probability of equally qualified applicants is reduced by about 22 percentage points due to an age differential of 14 years as opposed to only 12 percentage points in Norway. Within both countries the tendency to discriminate does not differ between students and personnel managers and does not depend on the age of the decision maker.

‘The phenomenon of unemployment among older workers […] is characterized less by the risk of becoming unemployed than by the problem of remaining unemployed and failing to find new work.’

Frerichs and Naegele (1998, p. 59)

Notes

¹ The untranslated advertisements are provided in the appendix of the working paper version of this article.

² The significant Kruskal–Wallis test result for Norwegian students is due to the high variance of wages for ‘young’ applicants. The means are not significantly different.

³ The Akaike Information Criterion is a model selection criterion that discounts the model fit by the number of explanatory variables. A smaller AIC statistic is preferred. It selects the model with the best fit while still being parsimonious.