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Time Travel on Professional Profiles
Nicholas Bloom,
Gideon Moore,
Lisa K. Simon
& Caelan Wilkie-Rogers
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Working Paper 35546
DOI 10.3386/w35546
Issue Date July 2026
Revision Date July 2026
Economists increasingly use professional profile data to reconstruct employment histories and measure skill supply. We show that these records are not fixed historical snapshots, but mutable accounts that workers revise over time. Using monthly vintages of Revelio Labs data from 2020–2026, we document that 19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users retroactively edit the title or description of a job they have already left. These “time-travel” edits are closely tied to labor market transitions: around such edits, workers are much more likely to change employers as compared to later-editing users. This mutability can bias historical measures of skills, but it also reveals workers’ beliefs about which skills are in demand. Retroactive edits show sharp post-2022 increases in AI-related language and recent reductions in work-from-home and DEI language. Finally, LLM-associated writing markers surge after ChatGPT, especially among less-educated groups and MBAs from lower-ranked programs, revealing heterogeneous AI-assisted profile editing.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
We thank Revelio Labs for access to the data and for assistance in constructing the monthly profile vintages. We thank Stanford Impact Labs for funding. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Revelio Labs, Stanford University, or the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Nicholas Bloom
I worked for McKinsey and company as a management consultant from 2001-2002. I have not received any funding from them after that time.
I am part of the Toulouse Network for Information Technology, which carries out research on IT and productivity. From this network I receive an annual honorarium, which is funded by Microsoft.
I do occasional consulting on management practices for government and policy agencies, like the Canadian Government, the World Bank, the European Union, the British Government, and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
I produced a report in 2008 for the World Economic Forum on management practices in private equity for which I received an honorarium.
I am a paid speaker at corporate events at which I discuss among other things working from home, management practices and policy uncertainty.
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Nicholas Bloom, Gideon Moore, Lisa K. Simon, and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers, "Time Travel on Professional Profiles," NBER Working Paper 35546 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35546.
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July 29, 2026
July 29, 2026
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