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

We study the cyclicality of online posted wages at the job level, using a representative dataset for the Chilean economy. Unlike other datasets, ours has wage and requirements for most job ads. We find clear evidence of posted wage procyclicality, in line with matched employer-employee studies. Our results are robust to cyclical mismatch and job upgrading biases, important issues in the literature. We also show that not controlling for requirements leads to the underestimation of the cyclicality of offered wages. Indeed, using the \cite{Gelbach-2016} decomposition, we show that ignoring countercyclical experience and education requirements dampens wage cyclicality estimates.

• 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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