Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful?

Alicia Modestino, Daniel Shoag and Joshua Ballance
Additional contact information
Daniel Shoag: Harvard University and Case Western Reserve University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020, vol. 102, issue 4, 793-805

Abstract: Using a proprietary database of online job postings, we find that education and experience requirements rose during the Great Recession. These increases were larger in states and occupations that experienced greater increases in the supply of available workers. This finding is robust to controlling for local demand conditions and firm Ã— job-title fixed effects and using a natural experiment arising from troop withdrawals as an exogenous shock to labor supply. Our results imply that the increase in unemployed workers during the Great Recession can account for 18% to 25% of the increase in skill requirements between 2007 and 2010.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest_a_00835 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful? (2015)
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:tpr:restat:v:102:y:2020:i:4:p:793-805

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kelly McDougall ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).