Applied Micro Seminar : Every Tuesday
Time: 12:15 pm – 13:30 pm
Date: December, 2nd
Room : 3001

Michael SIEGENTHALER  “The Role of Wages and Job Benefits in Job Search”

Abstract : 

This paper analyzes the importance of wages and job benefits based on a large-scale field experiment with more than 150’000 job seekers. To quantify the elasticity of job seekers’ applications to posted wages and their willingness to pay for twelve job benefits, we randomly provide the users of 112 Swiss job boards with supplementary information about the wages and benefits associated with the positions they explore. This information is sourced from the market-leading employer review platform. We interpret the field-experimental estimates by eliciting job seekers’ prior and posterior beliefs about wages and benefits in jobs in a complementary survey experiment. The revealed-preference estimates suggest that a 1% higher posted wage increases job seekers’ likelihood of viewing and applying to an ad by 0.4-0.5%. However, job seekers are quite well-informed about wage differences across jobs even in the control group and only partially update expectations about their own pay to posted wages. Thus, the wage estimates imply that job seekers’ true wage elasticity is approximately 3. In addition, four of the twelve job benefits are highly valued by job seekers: Home office and a company car are valued at 17% and company-provided childcare at 10% of wages. The average position offers job benefits worth 23% of wages. Since higher-paying companies tend to offer more benefits, inequality in job value is significantly higher than inequality in wages.

Co-authors : Andreas Beerli, Stefano Fiorin, Andreas Gulyas, Daniel Kopp and Mahsa Khoshnama

Organizers:
Benoît SCHMUTZ (Pôle économie du CREST)
Clément MALGOUYRES (Pôle économie du CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST