LinkedIn Profile Revisions Are Their Own Form of Job Market Data

LinkedIn was in large part designed to help people find jobs. It has inadvertently become a treasure trove for economists studying the modern labor market. One research team, for example, used LinkedIn to fill a gap in traditional data, analyzing layoffs and promotions by race, ethnicity and gender — ultimately finding discrimination at some of the companies it studied. Another used US Census figures and LinkedIn profiles to find that entrepreneurs are significantly more likely to hire workers f