These were some of the key labour market questions addressed by Martyn Andrews in a presentation at the Royal Economic Society's 1999 Annual Conference at the University of Nottingham on Tuesday 30 March. The equivalent figure for training programmes is about one in every four. Clearly, given that there are two sides to the labour market, employers make job offers and job-seekers accept or reject those offers, each decision depending on the characteristics of the other. This evidence indicates that for the job market, employers dominate but this is less true of the training market.
Employers posting high wage job vacancies are less likely to find a suitable worker.
Employers offering high wages are more selective because the opportunity cost of not hiring a worker is lower. However, employers who do not post a wage when advertising a vacancy, opting to bargain with applicants individually, are twice as likely not to find a suitable worker. Job vacancies that have been open for a long time are less likely to find a suitable worker and this probability falls significantly after one month, after two months and again after twelve months. Training vacancies behave very differently insofar as the chance of finding a suitable applicant rises for programmes that have been open between six and twelve months. This finding suggests that training programmes have been successful in absorbing any excess supply of youth labour.