Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful?
Alicia Modestino,
Daniel Shoag and
Joshua Ballance
Additional contact information
Daniel Shoag: Harvard University
Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Abstract:
In the wake of the Great Recession, policymakers and academics have expressed concerns about rising employer skill requirements. Using a large database of online job postings for middle-skill occupations, we demonstrate that employers opportunistically raise education and experience requirements, within occupations, in response to increases in the supply of relevant job seekers. This relationship is robust to numerous tests for potentially confounding factors, is present even within firm-job title pairs, and is consistent with the predictions of a standard employer search model. We further identify this effect by exploiting the natural experiment arising from troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan as an exogenous shock to local, occupation specific labor supply. Our results imply that increases in the number of people looking for work can account for roughly 30 percent of the total increase in employer skill requirements observed between 2007 and 2010.
JEL-codes: J21 J23 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)
Downloads: (external link)
https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=1176
Related works:
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:ecl:harjfk:rwp15-013
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().