We study how job seekers respond to wage announcements by assigning wages randomly to pairs of otherwise similar vacancies in a large number of professions. High wage vacancies attract more interest, in contrast with much of the evidence based on observational data. Some applicants only show interest in the low wage vacancy even when they were exposed to both. Both findings are core predictions of theories of directed/competitive search where workers trade off the wage with the perceived competition for the job. A calibrated model with multiple applications and on-the-job search induces magnitudes broadly in line with the empirical findings.
How wage announcements affect job search behavior – a field experiment
American Economic Journal – Macroeconomics, forthcoming 2022, with Michèle Belot and Paul Muller.
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, but still a non-trivial number of applicants only reveal an interest
in the low wage vacancy – qualitatively in line with a directed search model with multiple applications and on-the-job search.
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