  In 1990, one in five U.S. workers were aged over 50 years whereas today it is
one in three. One possible explanation for this is that occupations have become
more accommodating to the preferences of older workers. We explore this by
constructing an "age-friendliness" index for occupations. We use Natural
Language Processing to measure the degree of overlap between textual
descriptions of occupations and characteristics which define age-friendliness.
Our index provides an approximation to rankings produced by survey participants
and has predictive power for the occupational share of older workers. We find
that between 1990 and 2020 around three quarters of occupations have seen their
age-friendliness increase and employment in above-average age-friendly
occupations has risen by 49 million. However, older workers have not benefited
disproportionately from this rise, with substantial gains going to younger
females and college graduates and with male non-college educated workers losing
out the most. These findings point to the need to frame the rise of
age-friendly jobs in the context of other labour market trends and
imperfections. Purely age-based policies are insufficient given both
heterogeneity amongst older workers as well as similarities between groups of
older and younger workers. The latter is especially apparent in the overlapping
appeal of specific occupational characteristics.
