Labor market of regular workers in Japan: A perspective from job advertisement data

Kakuho Furukawa, Yoshihiko Hogen and Yosuke Kido

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2025, vol. 75, issue C

Abstract: We present an analysis of wages and labor market tightness for regular workers (full-time permanent workers) in Japan, utilizing a novel dataset of online job advertisements spanning the period from 2015 to 2022. Despite the importance of online job advertisements for the labor market, little has been studied for the case of Japan. Our study documents labor market conditions reflected in online job advertisement data and investigates how posted wages are related to the labor market tightness, and how they affect actual wages of existing workers. The results uncover several aspects of the labor market which are not captured by official statistics. First, we find that posted wages for regular workers increased at a pace faster than wages for existing regular workers in the sample period, with some heterogeneity across industries and skill requirements. Second, we find that the estimated job-filling rate observed from the dataset declined in recent years, which suggests difficulties that firms faced in hiring workers, and that this was associated with an increase in posted wages. Third, we find that an increase in posted wages positively affects the wages of existing regular workers after some time lag. Our empirical findings suggest that spillovers are driven by underlying mechanisms such as retention of existing workers, and fairness norms to maintain a balance in wages between newly hired workers and existing workers.

Keywords: Job advertisements; Alternative data; Posted wages; Labor demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J24 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889158324000352
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Labor Market of Regular Workers in Japan: A Perspective from Job Advertisement Data
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jjieco:v:75:y:2025:i:c:s0889158324000352

DOI: 10.1016/j.jjie.2024.101339

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies is currently edited by Takeo Hoshi

More articles in Journal of the Japanese and International Economies from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().