<mark>in the late 1990s, finding that Internet job search is ineffective in reducing unemployment duration. Using comparable data from a decade later, K</mark> uhn and Mansour (2014) replicated this study and found that Internet job search significantly reduced unemployment durations.<sup>2</sup> Kroft and Pope (2014), meanwhile, exploited the geographic and temporal variation in the expansion of the classifieds advertisement website Craigslist in the United States and found no effect on the unemployment rate. <mark>Atasoy (2013), on the other hand, examined the effects of the expansion of broadband Internet access in the United States from 1999 to 2007 on labor market outcomes and found that gaining access to broadband services in a county is associated with an increase in employment rates.</mark> <mark>Another strand of the literature examines the effect of Internet use on wage growth. It includes the work of DiMaggio and Bonikowski (2008), who found a positive association between Internet use and earnings growth at the end of the “Internet Boom” in the United States. While focusing on the dimension of “intermediaries” in the online hiring process, S</mark> tanton and Thomas (2015) found that workers affiliated with outsourcing agencies had substantially higher probabilities of finding a job and higher wages, relatively to those without an agency affiliation.<sup>3</sup> Offering evidence from 12 African countries, Hjort and Poulsen (2019) more recently exploited the gradual arrival of submarine Internet cables from Europe to African coastal cities and found that Internet penetration had large positive effects on employment in Africa and that the impact on job creation was also associated with an increase in average wages.

<mark>Offering evidence from Egypt, this paper builds on the aforementioned literature on the impact of Internet job search by the unemployed on their employment prospects. Even though the cited literature spans several studies related to these questions, these studies focused for the most part on the United States. In the context of the MENA region, where digitalization and Internet use among the youth have spread rapidly in recent years, no studies have examined these questions. This paper therefore investigates these questions in the context of Egypt, using representative panel data on the Egyptian labor market, more specifically</mark> the two most recent survey rounds of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS), conducted in the years 2012 and 2018.

Using data from these two survey rounds and tracking individuals’ job trajectories, I first examine the impact of Internet job search in 2012 by the unemployed on their employment prospects within 5 years following their unemployment spell, conditioning on individual characteristics in the preperiod. I also examine the impact of Internet job search on wage growth for employed job seekers. Taking advantage of the panel dimension of the data, I also rely on a first difference model to examine the impact of the change in Internet job search on the change in the probability of labor force participation and employment for working age individuals between 2012 and 2018. Moreover, I estimate a fixed-effects model to examine the impact of Internet job search on the

> 2 See Kuhn (2003) for general representation of Internet job search and Internet recruiting and the possible effects on the labor markets and policy implications.

> 3 Also see Faberman and Kudlyak (2016) for a review of the studies on the labor market and online job search and <mark>Autor (2001) on a discussion of the various mechanisms through which Internet affects worker-firm communications.</mark>

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