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

Alicia Modestino | Zendy; Daniel Shoag | Zendy; Joshua Ballance | Zendy

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

Author(s) -

Alicia Modestino,

Daniel Shoag,

Joshua Ballance

Publication year - 2019

Publication title -

the review of economics and statistics

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 8.999

H-Index - 165

eISSN - 1530-9142

pISSN - 0034-6535

DOI - 10.1162/rest_a_00835

Subject(s) - recession , great recession , labour economics , demand shock , shock (circulatory) , natural experiment , labor demand , economics , supply and demand , business , demographic economics , microeconomics , wage , keynesian economics , medicine , statistics , mathematics

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 × 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.

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