Make yourselves scarce: The effect of demographic change on the relative wages and employment rates of experienced workers

This paper studies the impact of demographic change on experienced workers’ relative wages and employment rates. We investigate empirical predictions from aframework of supply and demand for experience skill, using variation across U.S. local labor markets (LLMs) over the last decades and instrumenting experienceskill supply by the LLMs’ age structures a decade earlier. We find that aging substantially reduces experienced workers’ relative wages and full-time employmentrates, and also their labor market participation rates. Our results imply that the effect of demographic change on labor markets might be more severe than previously recognized, as it reaches beyond wages.