Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex ante...

Beginning in 1951, the Conference Board constructed a monthly job vacancy index by counting the number of help-wanted ads published in local newspapers in 51 metropolitan areas. We use the Help-Wanted Index (HWI) to document how immigration changes the number of job vacancies in the affected...

This paper proposes a simple general equilibrium model with labour market frictions and an imperfect financial market. The aim of the paper is to analyse the transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancies when financial constraints are in place. We model the financial sector as a...

How do employers attract the right workers? How important are posted wages vs. other job characteristics? Using data from the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, we show that most vacancies do not post wages, and, for those that do, job titles explain more than 90% of the wage variance. Job...

Exploiting results from the literature on non-parametric identification, we make three methodological contributions to the empirical literature estimating the matching function, commonly used to map unemployment and vacancies into hires. First, we show how to non-parametrically identify the...

This paper measures the job-search responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using realtime data on vacancy postings and ad views on Sweden's largest online job board. First, the labour demand shock in Sweden is as large as in the US, and affects industries and occupations heterogeneously. Second, the...

Recruitment behavior is important for the matching process in the labor market. Using unique linked survey-administrative data, we explore the relationships between hiring and recruitment policies. Faster hiring goes along with higher search effort, lower hiring standards and more generous...

This paper explores the relationship between the duration of a vacancy and the starting wage of a new job, using unusually informative data comprising detailed information on vacancies, the establishments posting the vacancies and the workers eventually filling the vacancies. We find that...

We develop a simple search equilibrium model of workplace training and education based on two features. First, investment in education improves job-related learning skills and reduces training costs burdened by firms. Second, firms with vacant skilled job slots can choose between recruitment...

This paper deals with empirical matching functions. The paper is innovative in several ways. First, unlike in most of the existing literature, matching functions are estimated not only on aggregate, but also on disaggregate levels which is unusual due to the scarcity of appropriate data....