Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful?
Using a proprietary database of online job postings, we find that education and experience requirements rose during the Great Recession. These increases were larger in states and occupations that experienced greater increases in the supply of available workers. This finding is robust to controlling for local demand conditions and firm [Formula: see text] job-title fixed effects and using a natural experiment arising from troop withdrawals as an exogenous shock to labor…