Essays on Job Search and Hiring in the Labor Market

Essays on Job Search and Hiring in the Labor Market PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
This dissertation contains three essays on job search and hiring in the labor market. My first essay studies intra-household risk-sharing and job search behaviors over the business cycle. In the Great Recession, the U.S. national unemployment rate rose above 10%. The Unemployment Insurance benefits were extended to as many as 99 weeks in some states. Such measures may be excessive for married people that can share risks with a spouse. I estimate a dynamic model of unitary households in which spouses make joint job search and savings decision. I find that intra-household risk sharing exacerbates the counter-cyclicality of the unemployment rate, but mitigates the welfare costs of aggregate fluctuations. The results suggest the unemployment rate overstates the severity of a labor market recession for married workers. Given that spouses can share risks with one another, little is know about the efficiency of Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs in the household context. In my second essay, I compare the cost-effectiveness of various UI programs. The UI program is more cost-effective if the receipt of benefits is conditional on spousal non-employment or unemployment. In addition, the spousal unemployment requirement rewards intra-household risk sharing. As a result, the UI disproportionally benefit low-wealth households. Finally, I find little evidence that the UI program weakens intra-household coordination of search participation decisions. On the contrary, the spousal unemployment requirement strengthens the coordination between spouses. My third essay explores the mechanisms behind the phenomenon that both wage and the unemployment hazard rate decline with unemployment duration. I focus on two potential causes: skill depreciation and the stigma effects of unemployment duration. The identification of the two mechanisms can be achieved because the duration dependences of wage and hazard rate are affected by the mechanisms differently. I estimate a general equilibrium model with skill depreciation, unobserved worker heterogeneity, and an imperfect screening technology. Results show that less than 15% of the negative duration dependence of hazard rate is due to skill depreciation. In addition, I find that expansions that raise the meeting rate for workers substantially worsen negative duration dependence of unemployment hazard rate.

Essays on Job Search and Hiring in the Labor Market

Essays on Job Search and Hiring in the Labor Market PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
This dissertation contains three essays on job search and hiring in the labor market. My first essay studies intra-household risk-sharing and job search behaviors over the business cycle. In the Great Recession, the U.S. national unemployment rate rose above 10%. The Unemployment Insurance benefits were extended to as many as 99 weeks in some states. Such measures may be excessive for married people that can share risks with a spouse. I estimate a dynamic model of unitary households in which spouses make joint job search and savings decision. I find that intra-household risk sharing exacerbates the counter-cyclicality of the unemployment rate, but mitigates the welfare costs of aggregate fluctuations. The results suggest the unemployment rate overstates the severity of a labor market recession for married workers. Given that spouses can share risks with one another, little is know about the efficiency of Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs in the household context. In my second essay, I compare the cost-effectiveness of various UI programs. The UI program is more cost-effective if the receipt of benefits is conditional on spousal non-employment or unemployment. In addition, the spousal unemployment requirement rewards intra-household risk sharing. As a result, the UI disproportionally benefit low-wealth households. Finally, I find little evidence that the UI program weakens intra-household coordination of search participation decisions. On the contrary, the spousal unemployment requirement strengthens the coordination between spouses. My third essay explores the mechanisms behind the phenomenon that both wage and the unemployment hazard rate decline with unemployment duration. I focus on two potential causes: skill depreciation and the stigma effects of unemployment duration. The identification of the two mechanisms can be achieved because the duration dependences of wage and hazard rate are affected by the mechanisms differently. I estimate a general equilibrium model with skill depreciation, unobserved worker heterogeneity, and an imperfect screening technology. Results show that less than 15% of the negative duration dependence of hazard rate is due to skill depreciation. In addition, I find that expansions that raise the meeting rate for workers substantially worsen negative duration dependence of unemployment hazard rate.

Essays on Job Search and Retraining

Essays on Job Search and Retraining PDF Author: Aicha Lucie Ben Dhia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
This thesis comprises three essays in empirical labor economics. Broadly, the essays provide evidence on the existence and the effects of information barriers in situations of job search and retraining. Chapter 1 (coauthored with Esther Mbih) begins from the observation that little is known about how job seekers decide to enroll in a training program. Decisions related to job training might be undermined by informational gaps, especially about program costs, enrollment procedures, and expectations of reemployment chances. The paper reports the results of a low-cost intervention aimed at testing for the existence of misinformation about training costs and returns, and its impact on enrollment. Partnering with the French Public Employment Services and the largest training provider in France, we sent 50,000 emails advertising training opportunities to job seekers in four regions of France in late summer 2016. We randomly added short messages on training costs, registration procedures, and training returns to the basic email template. A baseline survey reveals misperceptions about financial aspects of training participation among more than half of job seekers: they either believe that they need pay to participate in a training (45%) and/or that their unemployment benefits would be affected (30%). Further, half of respondents perceive enrollment procedures as complex or very complex. We find that receiving an email with a message emphasizing training returns in terms of employment more than doubles the likelihood that job seekers call back the training center. However, callback rates are low in absolute value (less than one percent) and we detect no impact on enrollment one to six months after the intervention. We provide suggestive evidence that increasing salience of basic information about training is driving the effects on callbacks rather than belief updating. Chapter 2 (coauthored with Bruno Crépon, Esther Mbih, Louise Paul-Delvaux, Bertille Picard and Vincent Pons) shows the results of another large-scale randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of an online platform helping job seekers adopt effective job search strategies. The platform combines labor market data from the French public employment agency and personal data from individual profiles to recommend users occupations and areas with high employment chances and to give them concrete tips to improve their job search methods. The experiment was conducted in collaboration with the French public employment agency on a sample of 212 277 job seekers from April to November 2017. An encouragement design led to a take-up rate of 26.2% in the treatment group and virtually zero in the control group. Following individual trajectories over 18 months after the intervention, we do not observe any impact on job seekers’ search effort and search scope, whether occupational or geographical. We find modest effects on search methods: job seekers using the website are more likely to rely on personal networks and to use resources provided by public employment services. However, we do not find any effect on self-reported well-being and on employment outcomes, both in the short run or in the middle run, indicating that more intensive interventions are required to bring unemployment down. Chapter 3 contributes to the debate on how to regulate the market of vocational training. Understanding the decision-making process of job seekers who benefit from public training is crucial to improve their matching with effective providers and increase competitive pressure on badly performing providers. The chapter reports the results of an online survey on job seekers in France who had participated in a training program between January 2017 and April 2018. The survey aimed at understanding what they knew of and how they selected a center among heterogeneous training providers. I find two main results. First, job seekers use very limited information when making their choices. Only a third of respondents compare different centers before choosing one and to find a training provider, almost all respondents use a single source of information, which for half of respondents is their caseworker. Second, job seekers take into account various factors beyond the probability of finding a job. Logistical considerations such as start date or distance to home play a more important role than provider characteristics such as employment performance or size and connections to firms. Taken together, these results may explain the low competitive pressure between job centers, which in turn may contribute to low value added.

Essays on Job Search Behavior and Labor Market Policies

Essays on Job Search Behavior and Labor Market Policies PDF Author: Robert Mahlstedt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Persistently high unemployment rates are a major threat to the social cohesion in many societies. To moderate the consequences of unemployment industrialized countries spend substantial shares of their GDP on labor market policies, while in recent years there has been a shift from passive measures, such as transfer payments, towards more activating elements which aim to promote the reintegration into the labor market. Although, there exists a wide range of evidence about the effects of traditional active labor market policies (ALMP) on participants' subsequent labor market outcomes, a deeper understanding of the impact of these programs on the job search behavior and the interplay with long-term labor market outcomes is necessary. This allows policy makers to improve the design of labor market policies and the allocation of unemployed workers into specific programs. Moreover, previous studies have shown that many traditional ALMP programs, like public employment or training schemes, do not achieve the desired results. ...

Labor Market Intermediaries

Labor Market Intermediaries PDF Author: United States. National Commission for Manpower Policy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Employment agencies
Languages : en
Pages : 722

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Book Description
Conference report on the role of employment services in helping to improve the operation of labour markets in the USA - comprises papers relating to job searching behaviour, public sector employment services in the USA and the UK, private sector agencies and community development organizations, etc., and discusses the use of press advertising and hiring halls, and a case study of private enterprise job placement. List of participants. Diagrams, references and statistical tables. Conference held in Washington 1977 November 17.

The Public Employment Service and Help Wanted Ads

The Public Employment Service and Help Wanted Ads PDF Author: United States. Employment and Training Administration
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Advertising, Classified
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Research report comparing newspaper advertising to job listings at employment services with regard to effectiveness of recruitment methodologys in the USA - examines the labour exchange role of public sector employment services from the job searching point of view, and discusses the findings of a survey carried out during 1974-1975 in which patterns and merits of both advertising channels used by employers and work seekers are evaluated. Diagrams, graphs, references and statistical tables.

Essays on Job Referrals in the Labor Market

Essays on Job Referrals in the Labor Market PDF Author: Ji Woong Moon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter empirically studies the effects of job referrals in the labor market, and the second chapter provides a theoretical explanation on the empirical findings. The third chapter explores the aggregate implications of job referrals quantitatively. In the U.S labor market, a majority of workers use referrals when searching for a job, but relatively little is known about how the quality of information transmitted through referrals is determined. In the first chapter, using recent survey data, I document that the effects of referrals are different between the currently employed searchers and the unemployed. Job referrals increase wages and job-finding probability for the employed searchers, but have statistically insignificant effects for the unemployed. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I build an equilibrium model of on-the-job search and referrals to capture these patterns and use it to understand how referrals affect the aggregate labor market. A novel feature of the model is that the extent of information transmission through referrals is endogenously determined by a strategic game. In equilibrium, referrals are endogenously more informative when the match surplus for firms is low. Consequently, the employed searchers benefit more from referrals as they search for high wage jobs, and the quality of information transmitted through referrals improves during recessions. In the third chapter, I calibrate the model and quantify the effects of job referrals on the aggregate labor market. The results show that referrals increase steady-state welfare substantially about 3-5% through better match quality. Referrals increase inequality, but mostly by benefiting workers who can use social connections.

Essays on Macroeconomics and Labor Markets

Essays on Macroeconomics and Labor Markets PDF Author: Ahmet Yusuf Mercan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Job mobility – the rate at which employed workers change their jobs without experiencing unemployment in between – plays a significant role in shaping individual level economic outcomes as well aggregate labor market dynamics. At the micro level, workers climb up the job ladder and receive wage increases by changing employers. Experimentation by way of switching jobs leads young workers into their right career paths. At the aggregate level, job mobility might improve the allocative efficiency of the labor market by facilitating the match of productive workers and firms. This dissertation sheds light on two issues pertaining to job mobility in the U.S. Chapter 1 studies the observed decline in employer-to-employer transitions in the U.S. during the last two decades, and proposes an explanation for this downward trend. Chapter 2 proposes a framework for analyzing the excess unemployment risk following a job- to-job transition and lays the groundwork for a broader future research agenda. Chapter 1 starts from the observation that employer-to-employer (E-E) transi- tions have declined in the United States during the last 20 years from a monthly rate of 2.7 percent in 1996 to 1.7 percent in 2016. In this chapter, I study the factors behind this observed decline. I document that most of the decrease in E-E transitions is accounted for by declines in matches with less than 12 months of job tenure. I attribute this decline to an increase in information about the quality of job opportunities. I then develop a search model with heterogenous matches and on-the-job search with learning about match quality. I show that the information channel can be identified from the change in the wage growth of job switchers. I estimate my model and find that workers in recent years have substantially more in- formation about matches before they are formed, turning jobs into inspection goods rather than experience goods. I find that this increase in information explains 50 to 60 percent of the decline in job mobility over the last two decades. Chapter 2 starts from the empirical finding that the risk of job loss is concen- trated in the early months of the job; after the initially high levels of unemployment risk, jobs become stable. This chapter argues that this initial excess exposure to un- employment risk renders job-to-job transitions risky. It formalizes this mechanism in a search and matching model in which job offers are “lotteries”, placing probabilities on job qualities, which are revealed early on in the new job. Workers know the prob- ability weights, and lotteries are heterogeneous in those weights. A set of job quality realizations lead workers to prefer quitting into unemployment. In this model, job mobility is affected by the value of unemployment, which represents the downside risk of accepting a job lottery. This consideration constitutes a mobility friction for employed workers. It explores all these properties and predictions in a calibrated version of the model. The chapter also highlights a new role of unemployment in- surance (UI): In the model, UI insures the downside risk of job-to-job transitions, and thereby subsidizes job mobility of workers already employed, and tilts the job composition to ex-ante riskier jobs. Chapter 2 closes by discussing potential implica- tions of this new view of unemployment insurance. The study therefore sheds light on how labor market policies affect the behavior of employed job seekers through a novel “experimentation subsidy” channel.

Essays on the Employment Service and Employers' Recruitment Behaviour

Essays on the Employment Service and Employers' Recruitment Behaviour PDF Author: Lars Behrenz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Employees
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description


Getting a Job

Getting a Job PDF Author: Mark Granovetter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651840X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This classic study of how 282 men in the United States found their jobs not only proves "it's not what you know but who you know," but also demonstrates how social activity influences labor markets. Examining the link between job contacts and social structure, Granovetter recognizes networking as the crucial link between economists studies of labor mobility and more focused studies of an individual's motivation to find work. This second edition is updated with a new Afterword and includes Granovetter's influential article "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problems of Embeddedness." "Who would imagine that a book with such a prosaic title as 'getting a job' could pose such provocative questions about social structure and even social policy? In a remarkably ingenious and deceptively simple analysis of data gathered from a carefully designed sample of professional, technical, and managerial employees . . . Granovetter manages to raise a number of critical issues for the economic theory of labor markets as well as for theories of social structure by exploiting the emerging 'social network' perspective."—Edward O. Laumann, American Journal of Sociology "This short volume has much to offer readers of many disciplines. . . . Granovetter demonstrates ingenuity in his design and collection of data."—Jacob Siegel, Monthly Labor Review "A fascinating exploration, for Granovetter's principal interest lies in utilizing sociological theory and method to ascertain the nature of the linkages through which labor market information is transmitted by 'friends and relatives.'"—Herbert Parnes, Industrial and Labor Relations Review

Essays on Labor Markets

Essays on Labor Markets PDF Author: Sayoudh Roy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frictional unemployment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis is a collection of three chapters that study various aspects of the labor force. The first two chapters study how labor markets respond to aggregate influences, when labor market frictions interact with other market features, and a third chapter that evaluates the impact of heterogeneity in households on interest rates. In the first two chapters, I focus on how the post-recession recovery of labor market variables is affected by imperfections in the market. The first chapter investigates the role of on-the-job search in the recovery process of employment, and how labor market power can suppress wages and incentivize against on-the-job search. Labor Market power allows a small number of firms to influence wages and employment in the market, and the suppression of wages persuades workers against expending costly search effort. The second chapter focuses on how the presence of financial frictions can affect the response of labor market variables in a frictional labor market. When bank liquidity is constrained in the event of a downturn, affecting the amount of loans available to firms, firms are unable to purchase the capital input they require to complement labor. This results in firms posting fewer vacancies, and a lower matching rate for workers, which hinders the recovery of employment. The third chapter introduces discount rate heterogeneity in Huggett (1993) and Aiyagari (1994) and evaluates the impact on interest rates.