Corporate Hiring under COVID-19: Labor Market Concentration, Downskilling, and Income Inequality

Abstract

We are grateful to Tom Ashenmacher at LinkUp for data access and support. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Working Remotely and the Supply-side Impact of Covid-19

“…1 Recent work examines the response of employment (Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Weber, 2020b;Cajner, Crane, Decker, Grigsby, Hamins-Puertolas, Hurst, Kurz, and Yildirmaz, 2020;Campello, Kankanhalli, and Muthukrishnan, 2020;Borjas and Cassidy, 2020;Fairlie, Couch, and Xu, 2020); firm revenue (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, 2020;Landier and Thesmar, 2020); firm closures (Bartik, Bertrand, Cullen, Glaeser, Luca, and Stanton, 2020); stock market performance (Ding, Levine, Lin, and Xie, 2020); or consumer spending Baker, Farrokhnia, Meyer, Pagel, and Yannelis (2020); Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Weber (2020a) during this period.…”

Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups

“…First, our search parameter data allow us to capture job seeker preferences independent of the job vacancies posted by firms, thus separating the supply of labor from labor demand. This is not feasible with job posting data that has been used thus far (Campello et al (2019(Campello et al ( , 2020b; Kahn et al (2020b)).…”

“…Bartik et al (2020b) show that low-wage workers and business closures drive most of the decline in small business employment at the onset of COVID-19. Using job posting data, Campello et al (2020b) show that, among public firms, small and credit constrained firms cut back on job postings more during there is also a larger decline in high-skill jobs relative to low-skill ones. Our paper focuses on labor supply and the ability of startups to attract talents during the COVID-19 crisis.…”

“…For example, a decline in hiring by early stage ventures could reflect a change in the hiring policies of such firms (labor demand), a decline in worker interest in such firms (labor supply), or both. A handful of recent studies have used online job posting data to investigate various questions about labor demand (Campello et al (2019(Campello et al ( , 2020b; Kahn et al (2020b) In order to analyze labor supply, we make use of a novel data set that we obtained from AngelList Talent, the largest online recruitment platform for private and entrepreneurial companies. In the most recent completed year, AngelList Talent had 3.6M active job seekers and over 185,000 new jobs listed.…”

“…The literature has found mixed evidence on the e ect of recessions on firms' skill demand(Hershbein and Kahn (2018);Campello et al (2020b);Chiplunkar et al (2020)) …”