Opening the Black Box of the Matching Function: The Power of Words

By Ioana Marinescu, Ronald Wolthoff. Journal of Labor Economics, 2020

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, high-wage job postings unexpectedly attract fewer applicants, and this is the case even within a detailed occupation. Viewed through the lens of our directed search model, this negative relationship is indicative of substantial applicant heterogeneity within an occupation. Empirically, we find that job title heterogeneity is key: within a job title, jobs with 10% higher wages do attract 7.7% more applicants. Furthermore, our findings are consistent with a higher return to worker quality for hires in “manager” and “senior” job titles. Overall, our findings demonstrate the power of words in the matching process.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb4a40f7911b3037e4ab1fdae379f3b246a38fdc

Citations in the corpus

• Job search during the COVID-19 crisis (2020, unknown): “Our analysis also relates more broadly to the empirical literature on job search that uses data from online job boards (Marinescu, 2017; Belot et al., 2018; Marinescu and Rathelot, 2018; Banfi and Villena-Roldan, 2019; Faberman and Kudlyak, 2019; Marinescu and Wolthoff, 2020; Kudlyak et al., 2020; B”