Opinion: Bye, Boomer: The Coming Cull of Workers over 50

Economists Gordon Dalh of the University of California, San Diego, and Matthew Knepper of the University of Georgia ran the numbers on age-discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and compared them with the unemployment rates in the relevant industry and U.S. state at the time.

“For each 1 percentage point increase in a state industry’s monthly unemployment rate, the volume of age discrimination firing and hiring charges increases by 4.8% and 3.4%, respectively,” they found.