Hannah Liepmann

We leverage rich data from a prominent online job board in Uruguay to assess directed search patterns in job applications, focusing on posted wages and advertised non-wage amenities. We find robust evidence of directed search based on posted wages in the cross-section, with stark heterogeneity by occupation: the wage-application correlation is driven by vacancies attached to lower-skill occupations, with applications to vacancies attached to higher-skill occupations showing no responsiveness to posted wages. By applying text analysis to the job ads, we elicit advertised non-wage amenities and find evidence of directed search based on non-wage amenities. Applications to vacancies attached to lower-skill occupations are consistent with lexicographic application preferences: amenities predict applications to these vacancies only when wages are not posted. Finally, we exploit industry-by-occupation minimum wage variation to demonstrate that the observed occupational heterogeneity in directed search patterns is supported by quasi-experimental difference-in-differences estimates of the impact of wages on job applications.

Abstract
Outside of Europe and the United States, the knowledge on skills dynamics is scarce due to a lack of data. We therefore assess whether online data on vacancies and applications to a job board can help fill this gap. We propose a taxonomy with three broad categories – cognitive, socioemotional, and manual skills – and 14 commonly observed subcategories, which we define based on unique skills identified through keywords and expressions. The taxonomy is comprehensive but succinct, suitable for developing and emerging economies, and adapted for online data. We then develop a text-mining approach to implement the taxonomy. Based on Uruguayan data from the job board BuscoJobs, we find that our model is able to assign skills to 64% of applicants' employment spells and 94% of vacancies. While online data are usually skewed toward highly qualified work, we show that our data include meaningful numbers of vacancies and applicants of intermediate and even lower qualification levels. Our approach relies on data that are currently available in many countries, thereby allowing for country-specific analysis that does not assume that occupational skills are constant across countries. This is key as we find considerable differences between our findings and those using US O-NET data. Finally, we end with an illustration of how our approach can inform the analysis of skills dynamics. To our knowledge, we are the first to explore this approach in the context of emerging economies.

We leverage rich data from a prominent online job board in Uruguay to assess directed
search patterns in job applications, focusing on posted wages and advertised non-wage
amenities. We find robust evidence of directed search based on posted wages in the crosssection, with stark heterogeneity by occupation: the wage-application correlation is driven
by vacancies attached to lower-skill occupations, with applications to vacancies attached
to higher-skill occupations showing no responsiveness to posted wages. By applying
text analysis to the job ads, we elicit advertised non-wage amenities and find evidence
of directed search based on non-wage amenities. Applications to vacancies attached to
lower-skill occupations are consistent with lexicographic application preferences: amenities
predict applications to these vacancies only when wages are not posted. Finally, we
exploit industry-by-occupation minimum wage variation to demonstrate that the observed
occupational heterogeneity in directed search patterns is supported by quasi-experimental
difference-in-differences estimates of the impact of wages on job applications.