employers recruitment behaviour and vacancy duration an empirical analysis for the dutch labour market the functioning of labour markets from a demand side perspective is examined in particular the determinants of vacancy duration are studied in the context of a model of employers search behaviour a model for the choice of the recruitment strategy at the start of the search process and the corresponding recruitment duration is developed in which allowance is made for different patterns of duration dependence for each recruitment strategy this model is applied to data on employers search behaviour in the dutch labour market it is found that employers prefer advertisements as the first recruitment channel when applicants are required to have work experience moreover employers prefer to start searching via the labour exchange office when jobs in the secondary segment of the labour market have to be filled it is also found that when advertisements are used as the first recruitment strategy employers need some time to acquire a pool of applicants and to select candidates from this pool it is inte

who is on linkedin self selection into professional online networks we analyze a large data set of fully employed individuals gathered through incentive compatible surveys to study who joins professional social network sites sns such as linkedin we test the conf

the impact of unemployment insurance on job search evidence from google search data job search is a key choice variable in theories of labor markets but is difficult to measure directly we develop a job search activity index based on google search data the google job search index gjsi we validate the gjsi with both survey and web based measures of job search unlike those measures the gjsi is high frequency geographically precise and available in real time we demonstrate the gjsi s utility by using it to study the effects of unemployment insurance policy changes between 2008 and 2014 we find no evidence of an economically meaningful effect of these changes on aggregate search

cereals demand in the sahel and potential impacts of regional cereals protection abstract recent policy debate in the sahel has focused on a regional protection zone for cereals this paper discusses crosscountry evidence of consumption patterns and the sensitivity of these to policy variables and considers potential income distribution and efficiency impacts of a rice tariff increase a tariff would hurt the poor in the short term because the poor depend to a large extent on rice as a fast food purchased from street vendors the trend toward rice consumption is a long term structural phenomenon linked to urbanization rather than to short term price changes maize and millet sorghum are substitutes in consumption which should serve to encourage development of maize in the guinean zone to help assure sahel food security in drought years

does online search crowd out traditional search and improve matching efficiency evidence from craigslist ever since the seminal work of stigler 1962 economists have recognized that information in markets is costly to acquire and can lead to search frictions the remarkable growth in online search has substantially lowered the cost of information acquisition despite this there is little evidence concerning the extent to which this has altered the search process and raised overall matching efficiency to address this issue we analyze the expansion of the website craigslist which allows users to post job ads and apartment and housing rental ads at virtually no cost exploiting the sharp geographic and temporal variation in the availability of online search induced by craigslist we produce three key findings craigslist significantly lowered classified job advertisements in newspapers caused a significant reduction in the apartment and housing rental vacancy rate and had no effect on the unemployment rate

does craigslist reduce waste evidence from california and florida abstract there is much discussion but little research on the environmental impacts of online platforms associated with the sharing economy economic theory suggests that falling transaction costs in secondhand markets increase incentives for people to exchange rather than discard used goods this paper uses difference in difference methods to estimate craigslist s effect on solid waste by exploiting a natural experiment in how the platform expanded across california and florida the econometric results suggest that craigslist reduced daily per capita solid waste generation by about one third of a pound though the estimates are not very precise a plausibility analysis of the weight of items posted on craigslist concludes that the 200 million annual for sale posts created by californians and floridians can reasonably account for waste reductions of roughly this magnitude

linking policies and economic voting explaining reelection in the case of the spanish socialist party economic voting literature has shown that voters hold governments responsible for the state of the economy election studies have also found that voters punish governing parties that divert from their campaign promises and move their policy positions these bodies of literature cannot convincingly explain the repeated reelection of the socialist party which passed supply side economic measures at odds with campaign promises and its traditional ideology furthermore the party succeeded in gaining reelection regardless of the state of the economy and despite consistently high unemployment in this article it is argued that to better understand the repeated electoral success of the socialist party three additional factors have to be taken into account the party system compensatory policies and internal party politics these factors allowed the spanish socialist party to build an electoral support coalition based on lower classes rural voters and voters dependent on state subsidized income

rhetoric on the economy have european parties changed their economic messages abstractthis study analyses the determinants of dispersion of economic issue mentions in european party manifestos we examined three main economic domains governmental control of the economy free market capitalism and support for the welfare state as consequences of globalization forces economic conditions partisanship and electoral turnout employing aggregate level comparative manifesto project cmp data from legislative elections in 15 european countries from 1970 to 2010 we confirm that parties hold a common view of the salience of economic control of the state as a consequence of globalization pressure and economic growth levels partisanship of the cabinets regardless of the political orientation counteracted issue salience concentration in the welfare domain government size favoured dispersion in the free market realm our results do not indicate clear homogenization of parties economic messages in elections over the last 40 years

job search and hyperbolic discounting structural estimation and policy evaluation this paper estimates the structural parameters of a job search model with hyperbolic discounting and endogenous search effort it estimates quantitatively the degree of hyperbolic discounting and assesses its implications for the impact of various policy interventions aimed at reducing unemployment the model is estimated using data on unemployment spells and accepted wages from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy the likelihood function explicitly incorporates all the restrictions implied by the optimal dynamic programming solution to the model both observed and unobserved heterogeneity are accounted for the results point to a substantial degree of hyperbolic discounting especially for low and medium wage workers the structural estimates are also used to evaluate alternative policy interventions for the unemployed estimates based on a model with exponential discounting may lead to biased inference on the economic impact of policies jel c6 c73 d90 j64 j68

lessons from the u s unemployment insurance experiments recent social experiments have evaluated two reforms of the unemployment insurance ui system reemployment bonuses and job search programs the bonus experiments show that economic incentives affect the length of ui receipt and provide weak evidence that an earlier return to work does not decrease earnings the experiments do not show the favorability of a permanent bonus program as they ignore its effect on the number of the claimants the job search experiments test several more promising reforms nearly all of the combinations of services and increased enforcement reduce ui receipt and have favorable cost benefit analyses earnings often increase though the estimates are imprecise

informal work networks we present a model of time allocation between formal and informal labour supply where workers learn of informal job opportunities from their peers in addition to formal income taxation and enforcement individuals labour supply decisions depend on the number of their peers with informal jobs and the strength of social ties workers allocate more time to informal activities when tax enforcement is lax and job information transmission is good more connected social networks e g wheel complete feature lower average income but higher average utility than poorly connected social networks e g star empty average income may be non monotonic in tax enforcement on presente un modele d allocation du temps entre l offre de travail formel et informel dans le cas ou les travailleurs apprennent l existence de possibilites de travail informel de leurs pairs en plus de dependre de l imposition des revenus formels et de la rigueur de ce processus les decisions des individus dans leur offre de travail dependent du nombre des pairs qui ont du travail informel et de la force des liens sociaux les travailleurs allouent plus de temps aux activites informelles quand l application de la loi fiscale est rel chee et que la transmission de l information a propos du travail informel est bonne des reseaux sociaux mieux connectes e g roue complet se traduisent par un revenu moyen plus bas mais par une utilite moyenne plus elevee que des reseaux sociaux plus pauvrement connectes e g etoile vide le revenu moyen peut avoir un lien non monotone a la nature de l application de la loi fiscale

processing and preparation costs for rice and coarse grains in urban mali subjecting an ipse dixit to empirical scrutiny abstract this article uses household survey data from bamako mali to address three questions important in the policy debate concerning the determinants of the substitution from coarse grains to rice in west african diets and policy options the questions are 1 what are the relative costs of rice and coarse grain based dishes with and without complementary sauce costs 2 what are the shares in total cost of individual processing and preparation stages 3 are pre processed coarse grains e g dehulled grain or flour cheaper to consume than coarse grains processed in the household contrary to prevailing opinion the paper shows that despite higher processing costs coarse grain based dishes are cheaper than rice based dishes the main contributory factors to the higher cost of rice based dishes are sauce cost cereal cost and preparation cooking and sauce preparation time the result holds true over a wide range of rice and coarse grain prices and opportunity costs of women s time suggesting that the finding applies more generally to the urban sahel and not just bamako moreover coarse grain based dishes need not take longer to process and prepare than rice based dishes if the dehulling step is mechanized however pre processed coarse grains are not competitive with household processing given present technology and opportunity costs of women s time nor will coarse grains be able to retain the extent of their cost advantage over rice as incomes and labor opportunity costs rise without improvements in the efficiency of processing services

labor market implications of weak ties 1 introductionmany of us have heard the phrase it s not what you know but who you know while this may not be strictly true approximately one half of workers in the united states do find employment through friends relatives and other social contacts granovetter 1995 further in a seminal paper granovetter 1973 argues that for the purpose of finding jobs it is acquaintances not close friends who are most important in helping individuals find employment he claims that friends whom one knows well are likely to be close in social space close friends know one s other close friends and tend to have social networks similar to each other thus any information held by a given close friend may be obtained from other close friends as well the job information of close friends is often redundant in contrast acquaintances tend to have less similar social networks and know different people from one s close friends granovetter argued that acquaintances also are more likely to have different information about available jobs which makes them valuable job contacts granovetter labeled acquaintances as weak ties as opposed to close friends who are known as strong ties in this article i am defining weak and strong ties as granovetter 1983 did weak ties are acquaintances and strong ties are close friends the important point of these definitions is the idea that on average acquaintances are less likely to know one s other friends than strong ties on average the social network of strong ties has more overlap than the social network of weak ties as i will explain in more detail below the lack of overlap of acquaintances implies that a social network with more weak ties will be larger will have more range than a social network with fewer weak ties since granovetter s article much work has been done by other scholars to validate the importance of weak ties in labor markets by answering two questions first researchers asked whether weak ties are a common source of finding employment these studies have been successful in demonstrating that weak ties are indeed an important source of finding employment for instance in granovetter 1973 of the people finding jobs through referral sources such as friends family and other personal contacts 27 8 use weak ties 16 7 use strong ties and the majority 55 6 use ties of moderate strength in between weak and strong others have replicated the finding that weak ties are a common means of finding employment 1 in summary this line of research has demonstrated that as granovetter claimed weak ties do play an important role in matching workers and jobs second because weak ties appear to be important in locating jobs researchers have asked if the use of weak ties as a job finding method increases income bridges and villemez 1986 marsden and hurlbert 1988 wegener 1991 the findings of these studies suggest that there is little evidence of a relationship between weak ties and income note that the hypothesized link between weak ties and income was not a part of granovetter s hypothesis as he makes clear in granovetter 1983 the present article can be seen as an extension to this second line of questioning in this article i use an example to show that previous methods used to measure the effect of weak ties on income will underestimate the effect if it exists i then provide a new method of estimating the effect of weak ties on income that directly considers the social network of individuals granovetter s idea that weak ties are more likely to provide novel information rests on the idea that weak ties are less likely to overlap than strong ties on average in other words weak ties know a smaller fraction of one s other friends compared with strong ties on average i use this idea to show that less overlap in friendships increases the range of an individual s social network

the general equilibrium impacts of unemployment insurance evidence from a large online job board abstract during the great recession u s unemployment benefits were extended by up to 73 weeks theory predicts that extensions increase unemployment by discouraging job search a partial equilibrium effect using data from the large job board careerbuilder com i find that a 10 increase in benefit duration decreased state level job applications by 1 but had no robust effect on job vacancies job seekers thus faced reduced competition for jobs a general equilibrium effect calibration implies that the general equilibrium effect reduces the impact of unemployment insurance on unemployment by 39

unemployment insurance and male unemployment duration in canada a model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on canadian men entitlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment the probability of a worker leaving unemployment declines with the duration of unemployment holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant when entitlement is allowed to vary the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration these results are robust with respect to allowing for person specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative specifications of duration dependence

are unemployed black youth income maximizers the exceedingly high rates of unemployment which plague black youth today have generated a great deal of interest and concern among economists and policymakers while recent research has provided some important insights into the nature and causes of the problem many puzzles remain unresolved for instance the evidence seems to indicate that the problem of unemployment for black youth is primarily one of lengthy duration or low probability of gaining employment rather than one of high frequency or high probability of losing employment furthermore the reported reservation wages of black youth remain above the minimum wage despite these lengthy durations of unemployment yet they continue to express desires for work and seek jobs which are comparable to those sought by white youth these findings raise several questions about the economic decisions made by young blacks do lengthy durations of joblessness reflect income or utility maximizing behavior on the part of black youth who accurately perceive their market and nonmarket opportunities for income and who choose their responses accordingly are their perceptions of these market opportunities accurate i e are expectations rational or at least do they adapt after some period of search if so is income being maximized or do other arguments in their utility functions such as leisure receive much weight this paper presents the results of an exercise that sheds some light on these issues in particular i analyze some survey data on job search by inner city black youth using a technique developed recently by lancaster and chesher 4 they use a simple incomemaximizing model of job search to derive formulas for the elasticities of reservation wages and employment probabilities with respect to nonwage income and job offer arrival rates these formulas enable us to compute these elasticities from summary statistics instead of estimating these parameters statistically however the technique is valid only if the stringent assumptions of the simple job search model are correct and if certain survey data can be interpreted in a particular manner the validity of an income maximizing search model for a sample of unemployed black youth is tested below using formulas derived by lancaster and chesher i compute the elasticities and employment probabilities for unemployed blacks that are implied by this model these are then compared to observed employment probabilities and econometrically

new markets and technological change for the traditional cereals in semiarid sub saharan africa the malian case during the last three decades in sub saharan africa development and research resources have concentrated on the higher rainfall and irrigated regions especially on export crops and the principal food crops grown there there has been much less concern and investment in semiarid regions without irrigation another negative factor has been the lack of public policy concern with the profitability of the basic food crops with good weather prices collapse with bad weather governments and ngos dispense food crops as food aid or at subsidized prices this article documents the importance of the demand side to facilitate diffusion of new technologies for the basic food commodities of semiarid regions the traditional cereals with farm programming models aggregated into a sector model the combination of technological change and demand shifts for sorghum are evaluated in one semiarid region where the traditional cereals are concentrated it focuses on combining policies to increase the prices farmers receive after introduction of technologies that use higher input levels it also compares benefits of a strategy that focuses on yield and demand increases for a traditional cereal of the semiarid region sorghum with two alternative strategies for the higher rainfall zone

unemployment and nonemployment heterogeneities in labor market states abstract the determination of how to distinguish between unemployment and nonparticipation is important and controversial the conventional approach employs a priori reasoning together with self reported current behavior this paper employs an evidence based classification of labor force status using information about the consequences of the behavior of the nonemployed we find that marginal attachment defined as desiring work although not searching is a distinct labor market state lying between those who do not desire work and the unemployed furthermore important heterogeneities exist within these nonemployment states two subsets of nonparticipants both engaged in waiting display behavior similar to the unemployed

the informal recruitment channel and the quality of job worker matches an analysis on italian survey data this article analyzes the consequences of being recruited through the informal channel in the italian labor market using data collected through a new survey implemented by institute for the development of the vocational training of workers isfol we find that while workers entering the labor market via professional ties enjoy a wage bonus and a reduction in entry times those recruited via family and friends referrals save on entry times but receive on average lower wages moreover the use of the family channel reduces the returns to education and is associated with the phenomenon of over education suggesting the existence of some mismatches between workers and jobs characteristics copyright 2011 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

does the public employment service affect search effort and outcomes in this paper we examine the disincentive effects of the public employment service on the search effort of unemployed workers and on their exit rate from unemployment for that purpose we specify a structural search model with fixed and variable costs of search in which unemployed workers select their optimal search intensity given the exogenous arrival rate of job contacts coming from the public employment agency because the theoretical effect of an increase in this exogenous job contact arrival rate on the structural exit rate from unemployment is ambiguous we estimate this model using individual unemployment duration data our results show that the exit rate from unemployment increases with the arrival rate of job contacts obtained by the public employment service especially for low educated and low skilled workers they also show that the search effort is more costly for low educated women and low skilled adult unemployed workers this last result suggests that a public employment agency that matches searchers and employers is beneficial in the sense that it saves searchers in terms of search costs they would otherwise bear

truthtelling in matching markets we analyze a search and matching model with non transferable utility and asymmetric information randomly paired agents go through an evaluation phase at the end of which they discover each other s types and choose to match or not before deciding to enter this phase agents can communicate through cheap talk we provide conditions for this communication to be informative and we examine how it affects agents welfare we show that communication is pareto improving only when the matching is assortative in the absence of communication and left unchanged by information transmission

employer search training and vacancy duration we develop a model of optimal employer search strategy when information about match quality is endogenous the model is tested using four data sets two of which have not previously been used as theory predicts we find that when filling positions requiring more training employers search more intensively and extensively employers also search more extensively when hiring workers with more education and with prior experience these findings provide strong evidence of systematic variation in search strategies based on the characteristics of the positions and job applicants factors that influence employer search also affect the duration of a vacancy

the impact of informal networks on quit behavior sector disaggregation the change in the level effect accounts for only 0 35 0 41 percentage point of the 2 24 percentage point deceleration in labor productivity growth between the 1948 65 and 1973 78 periods the aggregate rate and level effects are not very sensitive to the degree of disaggregation 12versus 60 sector although some large level effects are evident within and across major industrial divisions they often cancel out in the aggregate however the level effect from the shift out of farming is quantitatively large and is close to the aggregate level effect using either 12 sector or 60 sector disaggregation although one can approximate the aggregate level effect by looking only at that for agriculture one should note that other fairly large level effects exist both within and across major industrial divisions other than agriculture

is internet job search still ineffective using national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy97 data for 2005 8 we find that unemployed persons who look for work online are re employed about 25 faster than comparable workers who do not search online this finding contrasts with previous results for 1998 2001 and is robust to controls for cognitive test scores and detailed indicators of internet access internet job search ijs appears to be most effective in reducing unemployment durations when used to contact friends and relatives to send out resumes or fill out applications and also to look at advertisements we detect a weak positive relationship between ijs and wage growth between jobs over the past decade the internet has been credited for substantial reductions in search frictions in markets ranging from life insurance to apartment rentals brown and goolsbee 2002 kroft and pope 2010 in contrast studies of the internet s effects on labour market matching have been few in number and on balance find little or no evidence of a friction reducing effect for example kuhn and skuterud 2004 find that unemployed workers who look for work online have longer unemployment durations than comparable non internet searchers whereas kroft and pope 2010 find no evidence that the rapid expansion of craigslist as a job search tool has affected city level unemployment rates 1 at least on the surface these results seem puzzling in view of the dramatic expansion of online job search sites as well as the general decline in communication costs associated with the internet both of these changes should increase the arrival rate of matches between job searchers and vacancies thereby reducing search frictions in labour markets in this study we provide new evidence relevant to this puzzle of ineffective internet job search ijs using data on young us jobseekers during the period 2005 8 taken from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy97 our main result is that internet searchers unemployment durations are about 25 shorter than comparable workers who search offline only specifically after replicating kuhn and skuterud s 2004 estimate of a counterproductive effect of ijs using their current population survey cps data from 1998 2001 for this age group we show that this counterproductive effect is reversed in the more recent period in the same regression specification this reversal holds whether or not we control for a possible source of endogenous selection searchers scores on a widely used cognitive skills test that was not available in the earlier data we speculate that improvements in technology over this period ranging from better online job sites to network externalities associated with greater overall internet penetration might explain this change over time

job information networks neighborhood effects and inequality this paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends relatives and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market it also addresses the role of network structure and size the resource endowments of contacts and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks in doing so the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties inbreeding distance from structural holes etc the paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks that is where individuals obtain job related information through a given social structure and endogenous job information networks which are social networks that result from individuals uncoordinated actions the paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature finally the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies with the dynamics of human capital formation which include the joint effects of parental community and neighborhood human capital and are set in life cycle frequencies for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality

job search methods and their success a comparison of immigrants and natives in the uk a major issue in the immigration debate concerns whether immigrants take jobs away from natives in this article we present new evidence on the job search methods used by immigrants and their relative success in gaining employment in the uk we find that 1 immigrant job search is less successful than that of natives 2 immigrants are as likely to gain employment through informal methods as via verifiable routes 3 the probability of success increases with years since migration the finding that immigrants do not effectively compete for jobs may help explain why immigration has little impact on native employment

do friends and relatives really help in getting a good job informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies the common wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better quality and pay higher wages than jobs created through formal methods this paper explores the empirical evidence for european countries using the european community household panel echp and discovers a large cross country as well as cross industry variation in the wage differentials between jobs found through informal and formal methods across countries and industries wage premiums and wage penalties to finding jobs through personal contacts are equally frequent this paper argues that such variation can be explained by looking at firms recruitment strategies in labour markets where employers invest largely in formal recruitment activities matches created through this channel are likely to be of average better quality than those created through informal networks a simple theoretical model is used to show that employers invest more in recruitment for high productivity jobs and for positions that require considerable training the empirical predictions of the theory are successfully tested using industry level data on recruitment costs

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

with a little help from my friends quality of social networks job finding and job match quality this paper studies the effect of network quality on job finding and job match quality using longitudinal data and a direct measure of network quality which is based on the employment of friendship ties various identification strategies provide robust evidence that a higher number of employed contacts increases the job finding rate network quality also increases wages for high skilled workers forming networks with non familial contacts instead for low skilled workers more employed familial contacts lead to a negative but not significant effect on wages these findings reconcile previous mixed evidence of network effects on wages indicating heterogeneity by skill level and relationship type

fishing in different pools job search strategies and job finding success in canada in the early 1980s this article examines the job search methods of jobless workers and emphasizes sample selectivity in choice of job search strategies especially use of public employment agencies longitudinal data from the labour force survey of canada for 1981 1983 and 1986 indicate that job search methods change with the business cycle and that many people find jobs without any reported search the determinants of job search success also vary substantially over the business cycle implying a substantial social return to public employment agencies at the 1983 trough of the recession but no noticeable benefits when aggregate unemployment is relatively low

public employment agencies and unemployment spells reconciling the experimental and nonexperimental evidence econometric evidence strongly suggests that unemployed job seekers who use the services of a public employment agency pea have longer unemployment spells than those choosing alternative search methods yet in some well designed u s experiments increased use of pea services has been associated with faster transitions intojobs the author argues that the nonexperimental studies may be biased toward finding a positive relationship between unemployment spell duration and pea use because they ignore the possibility that peas are chosen by manyjobseekers only after other search methods have been tried unsuccessfully and a period of unemployment has elapsed an analysis of u k survey data with information on the timing of pea use in 1987 88 supports that hypothesis

revisiting the matching function abstract there is strong empirical evidence for cobb douglas matching functions we show in this paper that this widely found relation between matches on the one hand and unemployment and vacancies on the other hand can be the result of different underlying mechanisms obviously it can be generated by assuming a cobb douglas matching function less obvious the same relationship results from a vacancy free entry condition and idiosyncratic productivity shocks a positive aggregate productivity shock leads to more vacancy posting a shift of the idiosyncratic selection cutoff and thereby more hiring we calibrate a model with both mechanisms to administrative german labor market data and show that idiosyncratic productivity for new contacts is an important driver of the elasticity of the job finding rate with respect to the market tightness accounting for idiosyncratic productivity can explain the observed negative time trend in estimated matching efficiency and asymmetric business cycle responses to large aggregate shocks

informal job search and black youth unemployment in this paper i analyze how young black and white unemployed jobseekers use various methods of search and the employment outcomes which result from their use the focus is on distinguishing informal search methods i e friends and relatives or direct application without referral from more formal ones in analyzing racial differences the results show that the two informal methods of search account for about 90 of the difference in employment probabilities between white and black youth this also accounts for 57 71 of the difference in unemployment rates between the two furthermore most of these results reflect differences in the ability of these methods to generate job offers as opposed to differences in search effort or job acceptance rates however our ability to explain these differences through personal family and household characteristics was generally quite limited this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

moral hazard vs liquidity and optimal unemployment insurance this paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance ui benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from ui using this evidence i show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by ui benefits is due to a liquidity effect rather than distortions on marginal incentives to search moral hazard by combining two empirical strategies first i find that increases in benefits have much larger effects on durations for liquidity constrained households second lump sum severance payments increase durations substantially among constrained households i derive a formula for the optimal benefit level that depends only on the reduced form liquidity and moral hazard elasticities the formula implies that the optimal ui benefit level exceeds 50 percent of the wage the exact identification approach to welfare analysis proposed here yields robust optimal policy results because it does not require structural estimation of primitives

valuing new goods in a model with complementarity online newspapers many important economic questions hinge on the extent to which new goods either crowd out or complement consumption of existing products recent methods for studying new goods rule out complementarity by assumption so their applicability to these questions has been limited i develop a new model that relaxes this restriction and use it to study competition between print and online newspapers using new micro data from washington dc i estimate the relationship between the print and online papers in demand the welfare impact of the online paper s introduction and the expected impact of charging positive online prices

reprint of the general equilibrium impacts of unemployment insurance evidence from a large online job board abstract during the great recession u s unemployment benefits were extended by up to 73 weeks theory predicts that extensions increase unemployment by discouraging job search a partial equilibrium effect using data from the large job board careerbuilder com i find that a 10 increase in benefit duration decreased state level job applications by 1 but had no robust effect on job vacancies job seekers thus faced reduced competition for jobs a general equilibrium effect calibration implies that the general equilibrium effect reduces the impact of unemployment insurance on unemployment by 39

constructing accountability party position taking and economic voting a positive relationship between economic performance and support for incumbents is routinely taken as evidence that elections work for accountability recent investigations into this relationship h

technology and the labour market the assessment this article reviews the evidence on how technology will affect labour markets in advanced democracies over the next 10 15 years in addition to assessing evidence on the impact of technology on the aggregate number of jobs we take a wider view to consider how the digital revolution will affect the quality and composition of jobs how and where we work and whether labour is supplied as part of a larger firm or as a self employed micro entrepreneur this assessment further aims to situate the papers covered in this issue of the oxford review of policy within the broader literature

local and personal networks in employment and the development of labor markets evidence from the cut flower industry in ethiopia summary we examine the roles of local and personal networks in the employment process and the emergence and development of the labor market in ethiopia s growing cut flower industry using primary survey data of 320 workers randomly sampled from all 64 farms we find that workers who were recruited informally using the social ties were paid less than the formally recruited workers at hiring however these workers quickly increased their productivity and the effect of social ties on wages disappeared over time further we find that the development of labor market for this newly emerged industry took place particularly within the industrial cluster

does accessibility to local public employment agencies matter answers from a french quasi experiment abstractwe question whether accessibility to local public employment agencies impacts exits from unemployment we deal with the potential endogeneity of the residential location of jobseekers by using the unanticipated creation of a new agency in the french region of lyon as a quasi natural experiment we use exhaustive and geo located individual data on jobseekers and local public employment agencies contrary to past evidence based on aggregated data we find no evidence that jobseekers with improved accessibility to the local public employment services experience an improvement of their probability of exiting unemployment we however find evidence of transitory organizational effects these findings strongly question the costly strategy of a fine distribution of local public employment agencies across the territory while suggesting that institutional issues are key

a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage that under some fairly weak assumptions for all levels of the valence advantage the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate empirical studies of congressional elections by fiorina 1973 and ansolabehere snyder and stewart 2001 support this result d owns 1957 seminal work presents a puzzle for scholars of u s elections why do candidates not converge to the median voter one of the best explanations is that the candidates themselves have ideological preferences as calvert 1985 and wittman 1977 1983 have shown when candidates have such preferences and they are sufficiently uncertain about the preferences of the median voter then they do not converge although they may moderate their positions from their ideal point the basic version of the calvert wittman model however does not account for another basic fact of u s elections often one of the candidates has an advantage due to a nonpolicy factor such as incumbency greater campaign funds better name recognition superior charisma superior intelligence and so on stokes has dubbed such factors valence factors and he has noted their importance in u s elections stokes 1963 1992 1 in this article i extend the basic calvert wittman model by giving one candidate a valence advantage over the other i show that if the valence characteristics of the candidates are approximately equal then when a candidate s valence advantage increases this causes her to move toward the

endogenous job contact networks we use the uk quarterly labour force survey to document the presence of two phenomena first a positive correlation between unemployment rate and the proportion of job seekers who use social networks to nd jobs network use second a non monotone relation between unemployment rate and the proportion of recently employed workers who found their job through friends or relatives network productivity this second relation is positive for low levels of unemployment rate while it becomes negative for high levels of unemployment rate existing models of social networks and labor market generally assume that social networks are exogenous this assumption implies a negative correlation between unemployment rate and network productivity we develop a model where social networks are used to collect job oers but workers decide strategically how much to invest in their network we show that equilibrium job contact networks are dense and more productive in transmitting information when labor market turnover is moderate while they are less productive and segmented into clusters for either high or low turnover the equilibrium response of job contact networks to changes in labor market conditions is sucient to generate

principle vs pragmatism policy shifts and political competition this article investigates the electoral effect of party policy shifts i argue that whether party policy shifts are damaging or rewarding depends on whether the shift occurs in the pragmatic or principled issue domain on pragmatic issues voters value getting things done policy shifts in this domain signal responsiveness to the changing environment and are likely to be rewarded principled issues however concern core beliefs and values any policy shift in this domain is a sign of inconsistency and lack of credibility which is likely to lead to voter withdrawal these arguments are supported by evidence from 23 advanced democracies over a period of 40 years

hiring through referrals abstract an equilibrium search model of the labor market is combined with a social network the key features are that the workers network transmits information about jobs and that wages and firm entry are determined endogenously empirically the inter industry variation in aggregate matching efficiency is attributed to variation in referral use the model predicts that the efficiency of the aggregate matching function is pro cyclical which is consistent with empirical evidence

are bureaucrats paid like ceos performance compensation and turnover of top civil servants abstract recent research explores the effect of financial and career incentives on public sector hiring processes and subsequent performance the reverse relation between performance and bureaucrats compensation and turnover has received only limited attention due to the distinct features of public sector organizations bureaucrats are traditionally argued to require either permanent positions and fixed wages or low powered performance incentives this article studies how the performance of top civil servants in norwegian local governments affects their compensation and turnover we thereby build on a unique new dataset over the period 1991 2014 our results indicate that better performing top civil servants obtain a higher compensation and are less likely to be replaced nonetheless these incentives remain low powered in line with agency theory prescriptions

car ownership and the labor market of ethnic minorities we show how initial wealth differences between low skilled minorities and white workers can generate differences in their labor market outcomes this even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against ethnic minorities or exogenous differences in distance to jobs because of the initial wealth difference minorities cannot afford to buy a car while whites can car ownership allows whites to reach more jobs per unit of time which gives them a better bargaining position in the labor market as a result in equilibrium ethnic minorities end up with both higher unemployment rates and lower wages than whites furthermore we also show that it takes more time for minorities to reach their jobs even though they travel less miles when employed those predictions are consistent with the data better access to capital markets or better public transportation will reduce the differences in labor market outcomes

middlemen in bilateral search markets this article examines the role of middlemen in bilateral search markets e g employment agencies real estate brokers it is shown that the middleman narrows the set of buyer firm and seller worker types who search seller types with high valuations and buyer types with low valuations drop out of the search market and instead trade through the middleman the middleman also decreases the equilibrium search intensities of those agents who search it is proven that the middleman improves welfare if search is very costly and inefficient and decreases welfare if search is effectively costless and very efficient

sectoral differences in the use of information technology and matching efficiency in the us labour market the present study examines how the heterogeneity of use of information technology in production affects the probability that an unemployed worker will be matched with a vacancy using us time series from 1967 to 2007 i construct measures of dispersion of the stocks of software and hardware per worker across 13 industries the measures exhibit three waves whose timing roughly corresponds to the diffusion of mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s personal computers in the 1980s and the internet in the late 1990s after controlling for other influences i find that the probability of transitioning from unemployment to employment responds negatively to an increase in either measure the results imply that by enhancing technical heterogeneity the diffusion of a new technology may suppress the job finding rate

bending the pipeline executive search and gender inequality in hiring for top management jobs we study the sources of women s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search using data that include proprietary information on 10 970 individuals considered by a search firm we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles contrary to received wisdom we find limited evidence that demand side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting what gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply side and demand side actors once considered for a position women are no less likely than men to be hired though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates self steering behavior from the pipeline bending of hiring agents we discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market this p

an empirical investigation of the returns to job search the assumption of diminishing returns to job search plays a crucial role in the search model presented recently in this review by john seater this assumption is justified by noting that spatial aspects of the search process cause diminishing returns since travel time required to search firms in a circular area increases faster than the area to be searched besides being an important property of a class of theoretical models returns to search may partly explain the paradox of an approximately forty hour workweek contrasted with a seven hour search week see john barron and wesley mellow p 396 the interaction of diminishing returns to and positive costs of search may result in an optimal allocation of search time of only a few hours per week in this paper i examine whether the assumption of diminishing returns to job search can be supported by the data following seater the returns to search are measured by the number of firms contacted and the focus is on the ability of unemployed individuals to translate search time into employee contracts returns to search are evaluated by noting whether the production process exhibits diminishing returns with respect to the input variable

excess worker reallocation workers face a trade off between macroeconomic and individual incentives to work in different occupations industries namely between search frictions and personal comparative advantages workers endowed with heterogeneous multi dimensional skills search for jobs that require different skill combinations in equilibrium specialized individuals contact few selected types of vacancies where they are likely to be hired those with weak comparative advantages are seldom chosen among competing applicants thus seek any job type in a tight labour market comparative advantages dominate waiting costs offsetting labour mobility across industries occupations excess worker reallocation is lower and matches are more successful consistently with direct and indirect evidence

the relationship between unemployment spells and reservation wages as a test of search theory the theory of stationary job search predicts that controlling for other factors that affect the probability of leaving unemployment duration and reservation wages are likely to be positively associated the paper tests this prediction for british cross sectional data from 1982 using an estimating equation implied by search theory simultaneity is crucial in the evaluation of this prediction with single equation and instrumental variable estimates differing markedly perhaps surprisingly given the extreme paucity of both job interviews and offers in the sample the main finding is that reservation wages play a significant role in the determination of duration

empirical matching functions searchers vacancies and un biased elasticities this paper shows that conventional empirical estimates of matching functions are systematically biased because unobservable and endogenous search behaviour such as on the job search by workers or the use of different search channels by firms is neglected i propose an approach for recovering unbiased elasticities under different scenarios of competition for workers and jobs without the need for constructing proxies for unobserved stocks of searchers and vacancies using german administrative data i estimate the biases affecting conventional studies and derive bias corrected estimates of the matching elasticities under different scenarios

the concept of employability the concept of employability plays a crucial role in informing labour market policy in the uk the eu and beyond this paper analyses current and previous applications of the term and discusses its value as an exploratory concept and a framework for policy analysis it then traces the development of the concept discusses its role in current labour market and training strategies with particular reference to the uk and seeks to identify an approach to defining employability that can better inform labour market policy by transcending explanations of employment and unemployment that focus solely on either supply side or demand side factors although the literature offers a range of definitions of employability many policy makers have recently used the term as shorthand for the individual s employability skills and attributes it is argued that this narrow usage can lead to a hollowing out of the concept of employability the paper concludes by presenting a broad framework for analysing employability built around individual factors personal circumstances and external factors which acknowledges the importance of both supply and demand side factors

maize milling market reform and urban food security the case of zimbabwe abstract government policy in much of eastern and southern africa has encouraged the development of highly centralized large scale milling facilities which has in turn promoted the consumption of highly refined and expensive maize meal compared to that produced by small scale hammer mills policies to develop competitive small scale milling facilities in urban areas are apparently neglected because of the conventional perception in eastern and southern africa that urban consumers strongly prefer the refined industrially milled meals and are not responsive to price differences between various types of maize meals results of consumer and miller surveys in zimbabwe call into question the validity of these perceptions simulation analysis also indicates that the elimination of policy constraints that block small scale millers access to grain would reduce overall marketing costs thereby allowing higher producer prices lower consumer prices and or lower government subsidies the case of zimbabwe suggests that market reform may considerably reduce the magnitude of the tradeoff between governments food security and budget minimization objectives

the joint determination of household membership and market work the case of young men except in special cases market work and household membership are jointly chosen a nash bargaining model of family behavior is used to specify stochastic structural relationships two indirect utility functions and a market and a reservation wage function that jointly determine work consumption and household membership the maximum likelihood estimates of the implied trinomial probit model differ sharply from those obtained when either market work or household membership is taken as exogenous this application to white male youths from the national longitudinal surveys shows the insurance function of families parents insure their sons against poor market opportunities

inequality and party support positional economic voting or a new dimension of valence economic growth helps governments get re elected but does growth as a valence issue exhaust the possibilities for the economic vote this paper shows via an examination of 318 elections in esta

internet job search and unemployment durations after decades of stability the technologies used by workers to locate new jobs began to change rapidly with the diffusion of internet access in the late 1990 s which types of persons incorporated the internet into their job search strategy and did searching for work on line help these workers find new jobs faster we address these questions using measures of internet job search derived from the december 1998 and august 2000 cps computer and internet supplements matched with job search outcomes from subsequent cps files we find that internet searchers are positively selected on observables but negatively selected on unobservables a beneficial unemployment duration reducing causal effect of internet job search is consistent with our estimates only if negative selection on unobservables is especially strong in other words only if the population of on line resumes is strongly adversely selected

search method use by unemployed youth this article presents a search model which shows that search method choices should be related to their costs and expected productivities as well as to nonwage income and wage offer distributions the empirical evidence then shows that the most frequently used search methods i e friends and relatives and direct applications without referral are also the most productive in generating offers and acceptances the number of methods used is affected by factors that presumably reflect opportunities as well as income sources and needs specific methods are chosen in a manner that generates positive average effects on outcomes for those using them

the establishment level behavior of vacancies and hiring this paper is the first to study vacancies hires and vacancy yields at the establishment level in the job openings and labor turnover survey a large sample of u s employers to interpret the data we develop a simple model that identifies the flow of new vacancies and the job filling rate for vacant positions the job filling rate moves counter to aggregate employment but rises steeply with employer growth rates in the cross section it falls with employer size rises with worker turnover rates and varies by a factor of four across major industry groups we also develop evidence that the employer level hiring technology exhibits constant returns and that at the employer level and that employers rely heavily on other instruments in addition to vacancies as they vary hires we also develop evidence that effective recruiting intensity per vacancy varies over time accounting for about 41 of movements in aggregate hires in the 2007 to 2009 period our evidence and analysis provide useful inputs for assessing developing and calibrating theoretical models of search matching and hiring in the labor market

reported vs actual job search by unemployment insurance claimants this study compares self reported job search contacts of unemployment insurance recipients with independently verified job search contacts for the total sample reported contacts averaged 2 61 per week compared with actual contacts of only 1 78 per week nearly one fifth of the sample made no job contacts for the single weeks analyzed the separate equations estimated for reported and actual job contacts suggest that systematic misreporting may distort the conclusions particularly for the impact of unemployment insurance benefits on search intensity that would result from analyzing reported rather than actual contacts some implications of the findings for reported unemployment rates also are explored

the value of postsecondary credentials in the labor market an experimental study we study employers perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment we randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a large online job board we find that a business bachelor s degree from a for profit online institution is 22 percent less likely to receive a callback than one from a nonselective public institution in applications to health jobs we find that for profit credentials receive fewer callbacks unless the job requires an external quality indicator such as an occupational license jel i23 i26 j24 j44 j63 m51

the measurement of unemployment an empirical approach although the unemployment rate is one of the most widely cited and closely monitored economic statistics the definition and measurement of unemployment remain controversial an important issue is whether non employed persons who display a marginal attachment to the labor force for example those who are available for and desire work but are not searching for work should be classified as unemployed or non participants although this issue has been extensively debated it has never been tested empirically this paper carries out empirical tests of this and related hypotheses using a unique longitudinal data set from canada we find within the marginally attached a waiting group whose behavior indicates that they would be more appropriately classified as unemployed rather than out of the labor force the remainder of the marginally attached exhibit behavior between that of the unemployed and the balance of non participants suggesting that the desire for work among non searchers conveys substantial information about labor force attachment and future employment status our methods also apply to heterogeneity within the unemployed and we investigate behavioral variation linked to differences in job search methods and reasons for entry into unemployment although those using passive job search do exhibit behavior somewhat distinct from active searchers our results reject the practice of classifying passive job searchers as out of the labor force overall our results indicate that the non employed are very heterogeneous so that any single division into unemployment and out of the labor force is unlikely to fully capture the variety of degrees of labor force attachment this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the ecological fallacy revisited aggregate versus individual level findings on economics and elections and sociotropic voting several aggregate level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes operating in intuitively plausible directions more recent survey based studies however have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual voter level this persistent discrepancy is puzzling one recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or sociotropic fashion responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare rather than in terms of self interested pocketbook considerations it is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro and micro level studies are a statistical artifact arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components a government induced and politically relevant component and an exogenous component caused by life cycle and other politically irrelevant factors it is shown that because of this individual level cross sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign an aggregate level time series analysis on the other hand will often yield reasonably good if somewhat attenuated estimates of the underlying individual level effects of interest thus in this case individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate rather than individual level data it is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self interested pocketbook voting

personal networks and nonagricultural employment the case of a farming village in the philippines abstract this article based on an intensive village survey in the philippines analyzes the effects of personal networks on rural villagers access to nonagricultural occupations and the terms of employment given to them a key finding is that personal networks are selectively used to reduce transaction costs and their impacts on employment conditions vary by size and by location of enterprises we find that when villagers are employed in unskilled work at small enterprises those who use family relative networks receive wage premiums however if we limit our sample to small enterprises located near our study village the family relative network premiums become insignificant presumably because of the overriding influence of the community wide network within a narrow local community contrary to the case of small enterprises unskilled workers wages at large enterprises are not much affected by personal networks but are largely determined by years of schooling and work experience the recent developmen

broadband in the labor market the impact of residential high speed internet on married women s labor force participation the author investigates how high speed home internet use has affected labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits cross state variation in supply side constraints to reside

labour underutilisation in metropolitan labour markets in australia individual characteristics personal circumstances and local labour markets there has been a growing awareness that the issue of labour market disadvantage is substantially greater than merely considering unemployment and the ability to find a job there is an increasing l

does incarceration length affect labor market outcomes abstractthis paper studies how longer incarceration spells affect offenders labor market outcomes by using a reform that increased incarceration lengths by approximately 1 month i use detailed register data for offenders who predominantly serve incarceration spells of 1 2 months i analyze the sample for several years prior to and after incarceration and show that the reform led to an exogenous increase in incarceration lengths i find that the longer incarceration spells result in lower unemployment rates and higher earnings possibly because marginal increases in short incarceration spells improve conditions and incentives for rehabilitation while the costs of jail related to these outcomes are unaffected i show that the estimates are robust to different econometric specifications and further provide evidence that my results are not driven by changes in macroeconomic conditions

providing advice to jobseekers at low cost an experimental study on online advice we develop and evaluate experimentally a novel tool that redesigns the job search process by providing tailored advice at low cost we invited jobseekers to our computer facilities for twelve consecutive weekly sessions to search for real jobs on our web interface for one half instead of relying on their own search criteria we use readily available labour market data to display relevant alternative occupations and associated jobs the data indicate that this broadens the set of jobs they consider and increases their job interviews especially for participants who otherwise search narrowly and have been unemployed for a few months

city structure job search and labour discrimination theory and policy implications we consider a search matching model in which black workers are discriminated against and the job arrival rates of all workers depend on social networks as well as distance to jobs location choices are driven by the racial preferences of households both blacks and whites consciously choosing to trade off proximity to neighbors of similar racial backgrounds for proximity to jobs because of coordination failures in the location choices multiple urban equilibria emerge there is a spatial mismatch equilibrium in which blacks reside far away from jobs and experience high unemployment rates and a spatial match equilibrium in which blacks are closer to jobs and experience lower unemployment rates under some reasonable condition we demonstrate that all workers are better off in the spatial match equilibrium we then consider two policies affirmative action and employment subsidies to the firms which hire black workers we show that the optimal policy requires imposing larger quotas or subsidies in cities in which black workers reside far away from jobs than in cities in which they live closer to jobs

the role of spatial and skill mismatches explaining long term unemployment in paris in the paris region one can observe simultaneously the coexistence of a large and dynamic job pool with long lasting periods of unemployment this paradox reveals the importance of skill and spati

the dynamics of public support for coalition governments this article investigates the relationship between economic conditions and party support for coalition parties in denmark and the netherlands the article argues that the simple reward punishment model cannot fully account for changes in citizens support for parties given variable economic performance using aggregate public support data for political parties the article shows that citizens differentiate between coalition partners depending on the parties issue priorities instead of blaming or rewarding all coalition parties in a uniform fashion citizens shift support from one coalition party to another depending on the perceived competence of a party to deal with particular economic problems the article finds that the structure of responsibility in parliamentary democracies ruled by coalition governments is more complex than is often assumed therefore it is argued that students of economics and public opinion should pay particular attention to the institutional context in which citizens make ch

price policy and food consumption in urban mali abstract this study investigates the food consumption patterns of different income classes in urban areas of mali in order to assess the probable effects on dietary adequacy of the expected increase in the consumer price of rice brought about by food policy reform initiated in 1981 the results are to a degree counterintuitive demonstrating that understanding consumption patterns and their determinants is critical to informed policy making