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Vacancy duration and wages

Ihsaan Bassier, Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo


We estimate the elasticity of vacancy duration with respect to posted wages, using data from the near-universe of online job adverts in the United Kingdom. Our research design identifies duration elasticities by leveraging firm-level wage policies that are plausibly exogenous to hiring difficulties on specific job vacancies, and control for job and market-level fixed-effects. Wage policies are defined based on external information on pay settlements, or on sharp, internally-defined, firm-level changes. In our preferred specifications, we estimate duration elasticities in the range -3 to -5, which are substantially larger than the few existing estimates.


18 August 2023     Paper Number CEPDP1943

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This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Labour programme.