The Pay and Non-Pay Content of Job Ads

Abstract

How informative are job ads about the actual pay and non-pay attributes offered by employers? Using a comprehensive database of job ads posted by Norwegian employers, we develop a methodology to systematically classify the pay and non-pay job attributes advertised in vacancy texts. About 60% of job ads provide pay-related information and nearly all ads feature information on non-pay attributes. We link these advertised attributes to the employers posting the ads and validate this information against revealed-preference measures of employer quality, realized attributes, and choices from a survey experiment. All three strategies confirm that job ads provide reliable signals of employer quality. We then incorporate the detailed job attributes in a monopsony framework and quantify their contribution to labor market inequality.