Wage Cyclicality Revisited: The Role of Hiring Standards

Choi, Sekyu and Figueroa, Nincen and Villena-Roldán, Benjamin (2020): Wage Cyclicality Revisited: The Role of Hiring Standards.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze cyclicality of wages at the job level, using posted wage data from an online job board in an emerging economy. Our data contains a significant fraction of online job advertisements in the Chilean economy for the period 2009 to 2018 and is representative of the overall wage distribution of newly hired workers. One major advantage of our dataset is the availability of wage information along information on requirements for each job. We find significant levels of posted wage procyclicality, safely ignoring any cyclical mismatch. We show how omitted variable bias, by ignoring countercyclical changes in hiring standards, reduces the amount of cyclicality found in previous studies.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Wage cyclicality; online job boards; composition bias; hiring standards
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy > E24 - Employment ; Unemployment ; Wages ; Intergenerational Income Distribution ; Aggregate Human Capital ; Aggregate Labor Productivity; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J4 - Particular Labor Markets; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers

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