Online Job Posts Contain Very Little Wage Information

Abstract

We describe the small amount of wage information in online job posts in the U.S. and how the information that is available is systematically correlated with occupation wages, firms wages, and local labor market tightness. Only 14% of posts contain any information, and 75% of all posts are accounted for by firms with pay information in less than 5% of their posts. More than half of posts with pay information list a range that, on average, is wide, spanning 28% of the midpoint (e.g. $21-28/hr or $32,000-$42,000/yr). The lack of information is not ‘missing at random’. First, postings for high wage occupations and at high wage firms are less likely to provide any wage information, more likely to use ranges when they do, and wider ranges at that. Second, average wages in job postings are higher than workers’ wages in CPS and OES data, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution, by around 40 percent. In low wage salaried positions this jumps to 80 percent. Our results are exemplified by the top 20 posting private, which are representative of the U.S. economy, but have wage information in less than 2% of their posts, while the top 20 firms with wage information are unrepresentative of the U.S. economy.