The Review of Economics and Statistics 2026
Firm Concentration and Job Design: The Case of Schedule Flexible Work Arrangements
Abstract
We study how employer concentration affects job design, focusing on schedule flexibility as a non-wage job attribute. Using the full text of 46 million UK job vacancies from 2014–2019, we construct new measures of flexible work arrangements using supervised machine learning and large-language-model—assisted annotations. Adopting an instrumental variable strategy using a Bartik-style prediction of the change in employer concentration based on nationwide hiring trends, we show that higher concentration reduces the value of worker compensation partly through shifts toward “risky” flexibility that exposes workers to earnings volatility.
- DOI
- 10.1162/rest.a.1831
- Pages
- 1-45
- Language
- en
- Sources
- crossref openalex