skills in job descriptions. As mentioned earlier, we substantially improve the granularity of the skill taxonomy by adding a layer of language-specific key words, key phrases and text patterns.<sup>4</sup> Moreover, our paper relates to a broader literature building on job portal data in various contexts. Postings on platforms provide detailed data for general labor market analysis. For example, Azar et al. (2017) use US job vacancies collected by Burning Glass Technologies at the county level to study market concentration. Job platforms allow to study employers and job seekers’ behavior. Text analysis of the requirements posted by employers on job ads can inform us on existing gender bias (as shown in China by Kuhn and Shen, 2013). Applications can be sent through platforms to assess the extent of discrimination from employers, in the same spirit as resume audit-studies (Kuhn and Shen, 2015). Using US data from the portal CareerBuilder.com, Marinescu (2017) tracks how job seekers’ search behavior is impacted by changes in unemployment benefits duration. The same portal also allows Marinescu and Rathelot (2018) to study the importance of distance-tohome in job search strategies, and the geographical mismatches it can induce.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section II, we present the labor market in Kosovo and highlight its challenges. Section III describes the data, followed by the methodology in Section IV. We present our key findings on vacancy characteristics in Section V, and our results on skill needs in Section VI. We conclude in Section VII. An online appendix is available for additional details.<sup>5</sup>

# **II. The Kosovo labor market context**

Kosovo is the youngest and one of the poorest countries in Europe in terms of statehood and demographics, and GDP per capita. Despite stable economic growth in the last 10 years, job creation in Kosovo is at a low level. Between 2012 and 2018 about 44,000 new jobs were generated and the employment rate increased by 3.4 percentage points, from 26.6 percent to 29.4 percent (World Bank, 2020). Over the same time, the increase in the employment rate averaged 8 percentage points, from 44.4 percent to 52.5 percent in the Western Balkan region. While commerce and construction have been the main drivers of employment growth over the past decade, these sectors are characterized by low productivity and low wages. Still, employment

> 4 Our work also relates to a literature using text mining techniques due to the increased availability and scale of job portal data. For instance, a literature around Wowczko (2015) uses clustering methods to identify key skill requirements in job titles and descriptions of online vacancies. Despite their usefulness, the results are fully inductive and thereby often result in high error rates, which are especially problematic when findings are used for policy recommendation. We circumvent these challenges, by following a dictionary-based approach with pre-defined and validated key words, key sentences and dynamic regular expressions.

> 5 Appendix A is a technical appendix providing the detailed methodology for the analysis of platform data. Appendix B presents in more detail the skills taxonomy and the methodology for the textual analysis on skills. Additional graphs are provided in Appendix C. A comparison of STEP survey data with job platform data is provided in Appendix D. Instructions to replicate the analysis are provided in Appendix E.

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