How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search- A Field

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Belot, Michele; Kircher, Philipp; Muller, Paul
• 署名单位: Cornell University; University of Edinburgh; Universite Catholique Louvain; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MACROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7707
• DOI: 10.1257/mac.20200116
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 1-67
• 关键词: Directed search; financial incentives; equilibrium; MARKET; EFFICIENCY; monopsony; unemployment; INFORMATION; COMPETITION; dispersion

摘要

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 comple-mentary 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 C93, J31, J63, J64)