Caseworkers are the main human resources used to provide social services. This paper asks if, and how much, caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss UI caseworkers. I find...

Caseworkers are the main human resource used to provide social services. This paper asks if, and how much, caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss UI caseworkers. I find...

Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms or organizations. This paper studies how and why the interview assessment of a candidate depends on the other candidates seen by the same evaluator. We leverage novel administrative data covering about 29,000...

Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms or organizations. This paper studies how the interview assessment of a candidate depends on the other candidates seen by the same evaluator, and their relative timing in particular. We leverage novel administrative...

This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects early job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance (UI) scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months for...

This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects individuals’ job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months...