How Wage Announcements Affect Job Search— A Field Experiment
通过随机分配工资给相似职位空缺，发现高工资吸引更多求职者，但仍有不少人只申请低工资职位；补充调查显示高工资职位被认为竞争更激烈，支持定向/竞争性搜索理论的核心预测。
In a field experiment, we study how job seekers respond to posted wages by assigning wages randomly to pairs of otherwise similar vacancies in a large number of professions. Higher wages attract significantly more interest. Still, a nontrivial number of applicants only reveal an interest in the low-wage vacancy. With a complementary survey, we show that external raters perceive higher-wage jobs as more competitive. These findings qualitatively support core predictions of theories of directed/competitive search, though in the simplest calibrated model, applications react too strongly to the wage. We discuss extensions such as on-the-job search that rectify this.