IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29460.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit

Author

Listed:
  • Amanda Y. Agan
  • Bo Cowgill
  • Laura K. Gee

Abstract

We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters and over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates’ disclosures. Employers make negative inferences about non-disclosing candidates, and view salary history as a stronger signal about competing options than worker quality. Disclosures by men (and other highly-paid candidates) yield higher salary offers, but are negative signals of value (net of salary), yielding fewer callbacks. Male wage premiums are regarded as a weaker signal of quality than other wage premiums (such as working at higher paying firms).

Suggested Citation

  • Amanda Y. Agan & Bo Cowgill & Laura K. Gee, 2021. "Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit," NBER Working Papers 29460, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29460
    Note: LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29460.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James Bessen & Erich Denk & Chen Meng, 2024. "Perpetuating wage inequality: evidence from salary history bans," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 22(3), pages 709-733, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • J70 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - General
    • M50 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29460. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.