Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15263
Authors: Abigail Adams; Maria Balgova; Matthias Qian
Abstract: In this paper, we analyze firm demand for flexible jobs by exploiting the language used to describe work arrangements in job vacancies. We take a supervised machine learning approach to classify the work arrangements described in more than 46 million UK job vacancies. We highlight the existence of very different types of flexibility amongst low and high wage vacancies. Job flexibility at low wages is more likely to be offered alongside a wage-contract that exposes workers to earnings risk, while flexibility at higher wages and in more skilled occupations is more likely to be offered alongside a fixed salary that shields workers from earnings variation. We show that firm demand for flexible work arrangements is partly driven by a desire to reduce labor costs; we find that a large and unexpected change to the minimum wage led to a 7 percentage point increase in the proportion of flexible and non-salaried vacancies at low wages
Keywords: Labour Market Flexibility; Labour Demand; Minimum Wage; Job Vacancies
JEL Codes: J21; J23; J32; J33; C45; C81
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| minimum wage increase (J38) | proportion of flexible job postings (J60) |
| minimum wage increase (J38) | demand for flexible work arrangements (J29) |
| increase in labor costs (J39) | shift towards flexible, lower-risk employment arrangements (J29) |
| minimum wage increase (J38) | non-salaried vacancies (J63) |
| minimum wage increase (J38) | salaried vacancies (J63) |