Patrick Button

Does Protecting Older Workers from Discrimination Make it Harder to Get Hired? Evidence from Disability Discrimination Laws

We explore the effects of disability discrimination laws on hiring of older workers. A concern with antidiscrimination laws is that they may reduce hiring by raising the cost of terminations and—in the specific case of disability discrimination laws—raising the cost of employment because of the need to accommodate disabled workers. Moreover, disability discrimination laws can affect nondisabled older workers because they are fairly likely to develop work-related disabilities, but are generally not protected by these laws. Using state variation in disability discrimination protections, we find little or no evidence that stronger disability discrimination laws lower the hiring of nondisabled older workers. We similarly find no evidence of adverse effects of disability discrimination laws on hiring of disabled older workers.

Expanding Employment Discrimination Protections for Individuals with Disabilities: Evidence from California

Effective 2001, California passed the Prudence Kay Poppink Act, which broadened California’s disability employment discrimination law to cover individuals with less-severe disabilities by lowering the burden of proof to establish a disability. Using both difference-in-differences and difference-in-difference-in-differences regression analyses and data from the Current Population Survey, the author estimates how this act affected the labor market outcomes for individuals with disabilities. The results suggest that the act significantly increased employment for individuals with disabilities, with the effect persisting at least partially up to six years later.

A Replication of 'Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U.S. House' (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2004)

I replicate Lee, David S., Enrico Moretti, and Matthew J. Butler. 2004. “Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U.S. House,” using new advances in regression discontinuity design methodology and data extended to the 2012 election. For the methodology, I use nonparametric methods with optimal bandwidths and bias correction, and I investigate the sensitivity of results to parametric methods, bandwidth, and the inclusion of covariates. My results with this more thorough and modern analysis are the same.

Model Uncertainty and Model Averaging in Regression Discontinuity Designs

Abstract Parametric (polynomial) models are popular in research employing regression discontinuity designs and are required when data are discrete. However, researchers often choose a parametric model based on data inspection or pretesting. These approaches lead to standard errors and confidence intervals that are too small because they do not incorporate model uncertainty. I propose using Frequentist model averaging to incorporate model uncertainty into parametric models. My Monte Carlo experiments show that Frequentist model averaging leads to mean square error and coverage probability improvements over pretesting. An application to [Lee, D. S. 2008. “Randomized Experiments From Non-Random Selection in US House Elections.” Journal of Econometrics 142 (2): 675–697.] shows how this approach works in practice, and how conventionally selected models may not be ideal.

Expanding Disability Discrimination Protections to Those with Less Severe Impairments: Evidence from California's Prudence Kay Poppink Act

Individuals with less severe impairments are often ineligible for disability programs and are not covered under Americans with Disabilities Act, but this group still faces employment barriers through discrimination or requiring on-the-job accommodations. Effective 2001, California passed the Prudence Kay Poppink Act which broadened Californias disability employment discrimination laws to cover individuals with less severe impairments. I estimate how this act affected the labor market outcomes for these newly-covered disabled workers using both difference-in-differences and difference-in-differences-in-differences regression analyses using data from the Current Population Surveys Annual Social and Economic Supplement. The results generally show a large increase in employment.

Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment

We design and implement a large-scale resume correspondence study to address limitations of existing field experiments testing for age discrimination that may bias their results. One limitation that may bias results is giving older and younger applicants similar experience to make them “otherwise comparable.” A second limitation is that greater unobserved differences in human capital investment of older applicants may bias the results against finding age discrimination. On the basis of over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men.

Do State Laws Protecting Older Workers from Discrimination Reduce Age Discrimination in Hiring? Experimental (and Nonexperimental) Evidence

We provide evidence from a field experiment — a correspondence study — on age discrimination in hiring for retail sales jobs. We collect experimental data in all 50 states and then relate measured age discrimination — the difference in callback rates between old and young applicants — to variation across states in antidiscrimination laws offering protections to older workers that are stronger than the federal age and disability discrimination laws. We do a similar analysis for nonexperimental data on differences across states in hiring rates of older versus younger workers. The experimental evidence points consistently to evidence of hiring discrimination against older men and, more so, against older women. However, the evidence on the relationship between hiring discrimination against older workers and state variation in age and disability discrimination laws is not so clear; at a minimum, there is not a compelling case that stronger state protections reduce hiring discrimination against older workers. In contrast, the non-experimental evidence suggests that stronger disability discrimination protections increase the relative hiring of older workers.