TY  - JOUR
AU  - Deming, David
AU  - Kahn, Lisa B
TI  - Skill Requirements across Firms and Labor Markets: Evidence from Job Postings for Professionals
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 23328
PY  - 2017
Y2  - April 2017
DO  - 10.3386/w23328
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23328
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23328.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David J. Deming
Harvard Kennedy School
Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy
79 JFK St
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-4702
E-Mail: david_deming@harvard.edu

Lisa B. Kahn
Department of Economics
University of Rochester
280 Hutchison Rd
P.O. Box 270156
Rochester, NY 14627
E-Mail: lisa.kahn@rochester.edu
M1  - published as David Deming, Lisa B. Kahn. "Skill Requirements across Firms and Labor Markets: Evidence from Job Postings for Professionals," in Edward Lazear and Kathryn Shaw, organizers, "Firms and the Distribution of Income: The Roles of Productivity and Luck" Journal of Labor Economics, 36(S1) (2018)

AB  - We study variation in skill demands for professionals across firms and labor markets. We categorize a wide range of keywords found in job ads into ten general skills. There is substantial variation in these skill requirements, even within narrowly defined occupations. Focusing particularly on cognitive and social skills, we find positive correlations between each skill and external measures of pay and firm performance. We also find evidence of a cognitive social-skill complementarity for both outcomes. As a whole, the job skills have explanatory power in pay and firm performance regressions, beyond what is available in widely-used labor market data.
ER  -