IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v58y2023i6p1820-1849.html

Labor Market Signaling and the Value of College: Evidence from Resumes and the Truth

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Kreisman
  • Jonathan Smith
  • Bondi Arifin

Abstract

How do college noncompleters list schooling on their resumes? The negative signal of not completing might outweigh the positive signal of attending but not persisting. If so, job-seekers might hide noncompleted schooling on their resumes. To test this, we match resumes from an online jobs board to administrative educational records. We find that fully one in three job-seekers who attended college but did not earn a degree omit their only postsecondary schooling from their resumes. We further show that these are not casual omissions but are strategic decisions systematically related to schooling characteristics, such as selectivity and years of enrollment. We also find evidence of lying and show which degrees listed on resumes are most likely untrue. Lastly, we discuss implications. We show not only that this implies a commonly held assumption, that employers perfectly observe schooling, does not hold, but also that we can learn about which college experiences students believe are most valued by employers.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Kreisman & Jonathan Smith & Bondi Arifin, 2023. "Labor Market Signaling and the Value of College: Evidence from Resumes and the Truth," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 58(6), pages 1820-1849.
    • Handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:58:y:2023:i:6:p:1820-1849
    Note: DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0119-9979R2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jhr.uwpress.org/cgi/reprint/58/6/1820
    Download Restriction: A subscription is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stans, Renske & Ehrmantraut, Laura & Siemers, Malin & Pinger, Pia, 2025. "The Impact of Higher Education on Employer Perceptions," IZA Discussion Papers 17732, IZA Network @ LISER.
    2. Lane, Tom & Zhou, Minghai, 2025. "Voluntary quality disclosure in the Labour market," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 237(C).
    3. Deborah M. Weiss & Matthew L. Spitzer & Colton Cronin & Neil Chin, 2024. "Why college majors and selectivity matter: Major groupings, occupation specificity, and job skills," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 42(2), pages 278-304, April.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:58:y:2023:i:6:p:1820-1849. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://jhr.uwpress.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.