Hiring Difficulties, Recruitment Intensity, and the Dynamics of Vacancy
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Thomas Le Barbanchon, bocconi university
Hiring Difficulties and Firms’ Growth
Abstract
This paper studies the role of recruitment difficulties on firms' growth by combining unique vacancy-level data from France with an identification strategy based on a shift-share design. Specifically, we exploit cross-firm variation in exposure to recruiting difficulties stemming from initial differences in firms’ occupational mix and we leverage recruiting difficulties shifts using market-level changes in the time it takes to fill a vacancy in each occupation, with a leave-one-out correction at the industry-level. We find that higher hiring difficulties translate into fewer vacancies posted by firms employing workers in hard-to-recruit occupations. This hampers their employment, with a one-standard deviation increase in predicted recruiting time decreasing firms' employment by 5 to 9\%. These effects are especially large when firms are labor-intensive and when they employ a higher share of workers in highly specialized occupations. Complementing the results on employment, we find evidence of negative effects also on firms’ investment, profits, and sales. Finally, we show that firms partially adjust to hiring difficulties by increasing wages, retaining incumbent workers, and promoting them higher up into high-pay occupations.The Ins and Out of Vacancies
Abstract
This paper uses large-scale high-frequency data on vacancy flows from Austria to document the cyclicality of the flows of new vacancies, vacancy fillings and vacancy lapses. We apply a decomposition analysis of the time series variation of the stock of vacancies, similar to the one used by Shimer (2012) for the unemployment rate. We find that vacancy inflows explain at least two-thirds of the time series variation in the vacancy stocks, whereas the remainder is explained by vacancy fillings. Vacancy lapses, while accounting for about 20% of vacancy outflows, are acyclical. We set up a search-and-matching model with a fixed cost of vacancy posting and variable recruiting intensity and calibrate it to match the averages and cyclicalities of vacancy flows. The calibrated model has important implications for the cyclical behavior of recruiting intensity and the observed shifts in the Beveridge curve.Profitability Shocks and Firm Recruitment
Abstract
Many theoretical models of employment dynamics predict that firms respond to a positive profitability shocks by hiring more workers, which is achieved by either posting more vacancies or increasing the job filling rate per vacancy. However, the direct empirical evidence on the effect of profitability shocks on firm recruitment effort is virtually non-existent. This paper is filling this gap. We merge online job advertisement data with comprehensive quarterly firm-level data on revenues and value added from Denmark. We find growth in value added and revenue has a strong positive effect on vacancy posting but only when shocks are permanent; transitory shocks do not affect vacancy posting. The impact of positive and negative profitability shocks is symmetric, and the effects are approximately linear over the empirically relevant range.Discussant(s)
Christina Patterson
,
University of Chicago
Jason Faberman
,
Federal Reserve Board of Chicago
Ryan Michaels
,
Federal Reserve Board of Philadephia
Ioana Marinescu
,
University of Pennsylvania
JEL Classifications
- J0 - General