We test the hypothesis that locus of control - one's perception of control over events in life - influences search by affecting beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment. We find that reservation offers and effort are increasing in the belief that one's efforts...

Labor market programs may affect unemployed individuals' behavior before they enroll. Such ex ante effects may differ according to ethnic origin. We apply a novel method that relates self-reported perceived treatment rates and job search behavioral outcomes, such as the reservation wage or...

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probability that employed and unemployed job seekers find a job, and the quality of the job they find. The job finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed job seekers, and this...

This paper examines the predictive power of different estimation approaches for reservation wages. It applies stochastic frontier models for employed workers and the approach from Kiefer and Neumann (1979b) for unemployed workers. Furthermore, the question of whether or not reservation wages...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between social networks and the job search behavior of unemployed individuals. It is believed that networks convey useful information in the job search process such that individuals with larger networks should experience a higher productivity of informal...