Internet Job Search and Unemployment Durations

By Peter Kuhn, M. Skuterud. Social Science Research Network, 2002

371 citations recorded by the source corpus.

After decades of stability, the technologies used by workers to locate new jobs began to change rapidly with the diffusion of internet access in the late 1990’s. Which types of persons incorporated the internet into their job search strategy, and did searching for work on line help these workers find new jobs faster? We address these questions using measures of internet job search derived from the December 1998 and August 2000 CPS Computer and Internet Supplements, matched with job search outcomes from subsequent CPS files. We find that internet searchers are positively selected on observables, but negatively selected on unobservables. A beneficial (unemployment-duration reducing) causal effect of internet job search is consistent with our estimates only if negative selection on unobservables is especially strong, in other words only if the population of on-line resumes is strongly adversely selected.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b0f2971e1823d3c91ac9cd27096e012084222fe

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. M. Alan
2. Hani Mansour
3. Scott Schaefer
4. Connie R. Wanberg
5. Paul D. Oyer
6. Peter Kuhn
7. David Kryscynski
8. Benjamin A. Campbell

In Marketing

1. Hani Mansour
2. Connie R. Wanberg
3. M. Alan
4. Peter Kuhn
5. Russell W. Coff

Citations in the corpus

• Rethinking Sustained Competitive Advantage from Human Capital (2012, background): “Accordingly, as mobility costs decrease, mobility rates increase (Stevenson, 2009), as does the speed of finding new jobs (Kuhn & Skuterud, 2004).”
• Personnel Economics: Hiring and Incentives (2010, background): “Kuhn and Skuterud (2004), for example, use the Current Population Survey Computer and Internet Supplements to examine selection into internet job search and unemployment durations among online job searchers.”
• The individual experience of unemployment. (2012, background): “Self-regulation theories suggest that individuals differ in their abilities to successfully modulate their emotions, attention, effort, and performance during goal-directed activity (see, for example, Bandura 1986, Kuhl 1985).”
• Imperfect Competition in the Labor Market (2011, background): “Kuhn and Skutterud (2004) do not find a higher job-finding rate for those who report using the Internet and the Beveridge curve does not appear to have shifted inwards.”
• Is Internet Job Search Still Ineffective? (2014, positive): “…the share of young, unemployed workers who used the Internet to look for work tripled, from 24% to 74%.2 In contrast to a hypothesis advanced in Kuhn and Skuterud (2004), we find that online search is not disproportionately passive (relative to offline search), which might help explain its…”
• Choice and success of job search methods (2008, neutral): “With the diffusion of new technologies the list of search methods has been extended in the last years by Internet job services (Kuhn and Skuterud, 2004).”