How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search—A Field Experiment

Michèle Belot, Philipp Kircher and Paul Muller

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2022, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-67

Abstract: In a field experiment, we study how job seekers respond to posted wages by assigning wages randomly to pairs of otherwise similar vacancies in a large number of professions. Higher wages attract significantly more interest. Still, a nontrivial number of applicants only reveal an interest in the low-wage vacancy. With a complementary survey, we show that external raters perceive higher-wage jobs as more competitive. These findings qualitatively support core predictions of theories of directed/competitive search, though in the simplest calibrated model, applications react too strongly to the wage. We discuss extensions such as on-the-job search that rectify this.

JEL-codes: C93 J31 J63 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
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)
Working Paper: How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search: A Field Experiment (2018)
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DOI: 10.1257/mac.20200116

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