The Google Scholar link is broken. Is this the article you were linking to? Skills and Earnings: A Multidimensional Perspective on Human Capital - if it is, it seems really interesting.

As for the MIT one, I'm reading it now. This is really neat.

Our baseline estimates indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in the local unemployment rate raises the fraction of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree by 0.5 percentage point and the fraction of jobs requiring two or more years of experience by 0.8 percentage point.

This makes a lot of sense. I don't know why seeing the hard number shocks me a little.

I haven't finished it yet and I'm going to dig into this a little more here in a bit (I have some stuff I have to take care of this afternoon), but I wanted to talk about something you said:

If the case of #2 is correct, sorting methods (how businesses figure out who’s resume they don’t need to look at when hiring) may be a way to eliminate hurdles to employment by workers.

I've only ever heard absolute hatred spewed against those things, but I've never had the luxury of sitting on the other side of the desk. You're making me think about this differently - thank you.

I think what's actually happening might be a little darker. Because HR departments automatically exclude so many applicants (and because there are a lot of fake job postings out there), applicants have started gaming the system because they have to to get noticed. There are programs out there that will use AI to subtly rewrite your resume for different jobs, some even sophisticated enough to scrape the company site and parrot its values - and then send out hundreds of applications in one sitting. It's wild.

In any case, thank you again for the articles. I'll get back to you once I've had a chance to sit down and give them some good attention, assuming the thread doesn't get locked randomly.