Séminaire de Benjamín VILLENA ROLDÁN

Séminaire de Benjamín VILLENA ROLDÁN

Le 6 juin 2024

Le prochain séminaire du GAINS aura lieu le 06 juin 2024 de 10h30 à 12h00 en salle T209.

Benjamín VILLENA ROLDÁN (Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello) présentera " Wage Cyclicality Revisited: The Role of Hiring Standards", co-écrit avec Sekyu Choi (Bristol) and Nincen Figueroa (UDP).

Abstract:

Using more than a decade of information on online job ads, we estimate real wage cyclicality and highlight the importance of controlling for job characteristics to obtain unbiased results. Given the richness of our dataset, where we have granular information on job ads (job titles and firm identifiers), along with information on offered wages, job requirements, and the number of actual positions offered, we highlight how data quality affects the estimates of wage cyclicality found in previous empirical work. We show that controlling for hiring standards is important to compare wages of the same position, aiming at hiring the same kind of worker in different phases of the business cycle. Moreover, as hiring standards are countercyclical, omitting them leads to an underestimation of wage cyclicality. Second, weighting by the number of job positions is crucial, given that single ads may represent multiple job positions, and this multiplicity is heterogeneous across both the wage distribution and the business cycle. We find that ignoring this representativeness lowers cyclical estimates significantly. The facts are consistent with a search and matching model with both aggregate and idiosyncratic match productivity shocks in which employers set hiring standards. Our simulations show that cyclical standards arise when firms alleviate the effects of aggregate shocks through idiosyncratic standards, and they face a small surplus from hiring. This provides strong evidence for the idea of small fundamental surpluses being behind the volatility of equilibrium unemployment, procyclical wages and countercyclical hiring standards.