How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search: A Field Experiment

Michèle Belot, Philipp Kircher and Paul Muller

No 11814, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study how job seekers respond to wage announcements by assigning wages randomly to pairs of otherwise similar vacancies in a large number of professions. High wage vacancies attract more interest, in contrast with much of the evidence based on observational data. Some applicants only show interest in the low wage vacancy even when they were exposed to both. Both findings are core predictions of theories of directed/competitive search where workers trade off the wage with the perceived competition for the job. A calibrated model with multiple applications and on-the-job search induces magnitudes broadly in line with the empirical findings.

Keywords: field experiments; wage competition; directed search; online job search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J31 J63 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75 pages
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-eur, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published - published in: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2022, 14 (4), 1–67

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https://docs.iza.org/dp11814.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search—A Field Experiment (2022)
Working Paper: How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search - A Field Experiment (2018)
Working Paper: How wage announcements affect job search - a field experiment (2018)
Working Paper: How wage announcements affect job search - a field experiment (2018)
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