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Opening the Black Box of the Matching Function: The Power of Words

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  • Ioana Marinescu
  • Ronald Wolthoff

Abstract

How do employers attract the right workers? How important are posted wages vs. other job characteristics? Using data from the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, this paper shows that most vacancies do not post wages and, for those that do, job titles explain more than 90% of the wage variance. Job titles also explain more than 80% of the across-vacancies variance in the education and experience of applicants. Finally, failing to control for job titles leads to a spurious negative elasticity of labour supply. Thus, results of this paper uncover the previously undocumented power of words in the job matching process. [Working Paper 22508]

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  • Ioana Marinescu & Ronald Wolthoff, 2016. "Opening the Black Box of the Matching Function: The Power of Words," Working Papers id:11229, eSocialSciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:11229
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Black Box ; Matching Function; Power of Words; CareerBuilder; variance; education; experience; applicants; job matching process; workers; wages; job bard; vacancies; labour supply; career paths;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J63 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

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