https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/1816695...shoag-ballance
Five or six years ago, everyone from the US Chamber of Commerce to the Obama White House was talking about a “skills gap.”
The theory here was that high unemployment reflected a structural shift in the labor market such that jobs were available, but workers simply didn’t have the right education or training for them. Harvard Business Review ran articles about this — including articles rebutting people who said the “skills gap” didn't exist — and big companies like Siemens ran paid sponsor content in the Atlantic explaining how to fix the skills gap...
...Now along comes a new paper from Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance presented this week at the American Economics Association’s annual conference that shows the skeptics were right all along — employers responded to high unemployment by making their job descriptions more stringent. When unemployment went down thanks to the demand-side recovery, suddenly employers got more relaxed again...
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