@article {232746,
	title = {Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers are Plentiful?},
	journal = {Forthcoming at Review of Economics and Statistics  },
	year = {Working Paper},
	abstract = {In the wake of the Great Recession, policymakers and academics have expressed concerns about\&nbsp;rising employer skill requirements. Using a large database of online job postings for middle-skill\&nbsp;occupations, we demonstrate that employers opportunistically raise education and experience\&nbsp;requirements, within occupations, in response to increases in the supply of relevant job seekers. This\&nbsp;relationship is robust to numerous tests for potentially confounding factors, is present even within\&nbsp;firm-job title pairs, and is consistent with the predictions of a standard employer search model. We\&nbsp;further identify this effect by exploiting the natural experiment arising from troop-withdrawals in\&nbsp;Iraq and Afghanistan as an exogenous shock to local, occupation-specific labor supply. Our results\&nbsp;imply that increases in the number of people looking for work can account for roughly 30 percent of\&nbsp;the total increase in employer skill requirements observed between 2007 and 2010.},
	author = {Alicia Sasser Modestino and Joshua Ballance and Daniel Shoag}
}
