Huixin Bi
(Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City)
will give a presentation on
Dynamics of Job Search Effort and Vacancies: Evidence from Classified Advertisements
Abstract: We introduce a new dataset of job search effort and vacancies from the early twentieth century, providing new insights of the response of search effort to labor market conditions. Combining scanned images of U.S. newspapers with morphological operations, we construct local and national measures of job posts placed by both firms and job seekers in the classified advertisements. To our knowledge, we are the first to systematically document and use the ``situation-wanted'' advertisements placed by job seekers. We use moments from our national measures to discipline a model of equilibrium search effort by the unemployed to examine its implications for labor market dynamics.
(joint with Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Nora Traum, and Greg Woodward)