Job Search Behavior Among the Employed and Non-Employed

By Jason Faberman, Andreas I. Mueller, Ayşegül Şahin, Giorgio Topa. Social Science Research Network, 2017

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a unique survey that focuses on the job search behavior of individuals regardless of their labor force status and field it annually starting in 2013. We use our survey to study the relationship between search effort and outcomes for the employed and non‐employed. Three important facts stand out: (1) on‐the‐job search is pervasive, and is more intense at the lower rungs of the job ladder; (2) the employed are at least three times more effective than the unemployed in job search; and (3) the employed receive better job offers than the unemployed. We set up a general equilibrium model of on‐the‐job search with endogenous search effort, calibrate it to fit our new facts, and find that the search effort of the employed is highly elastic. We show that search effort substantially amplifies labor market responses to productivity shocks over the business cycle.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ea4cebd4a94289dc12a588a3d6e021a30733453

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Citations in the corpus

Job Seekers’ Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias (2018, unknown): “15, in line with recent evidence in Faberman et al. [2017]. We assume that wages are lognormally distributed, with a standard deviation of the logged distribution of σw = 0.24 as estimated by Hall and Mueller [2018] with the KM survey data. We normalize the median of the wage offer distribution to 1”
Concentration in US labor markets: Evidence from online vacancy data (2020, background): “Indeed, 55% of job offers are accepted by the non-employed, showing that in practice workers have few offers they could have accepted (Faberman et al., 2017).”