Journal ArticleDOI
Duration Dependence and Labor Market Conditions: Evidence from a Field Experiment*
TLDR
In this paper, the role of employer behavior in generating negative duration dependence was studied by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities, showing that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker's unemployment spell, with the majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months.Abstract:
This article studies the role of employer behavior in generating ''negative duration dependence''—the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell—by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker's unemployment spell, with the majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months. We explore how this effect varies with local labor market conditions and find that duration de- pendence is stronger when the local labor market is tighter. This result is consistent with the prediction of a broad class of screening models in which employers use the unemployment spell length as a signal of unobserved productivity and recognize that this signal is less informative in weak labor markets. JEL Code: J64.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Unobservable Selection and Coefficient Stability: Theory and Evidence
TL;DR: This article developed an extension of the theory that connects bias explicitly to coefficient stability and showed that it is necessary to take into account coefficient and R-squared movements, and showed two validation exercises and discuss application to the economics literature.
Journal ArticleDOI
Do Employers Use Unemployment as a Sorting Criterion When Hiring? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Stefan Eriksson,Dan-Olof Rooth +1 more
TL;DR: This paper found that long-term unemployment spells in the past do not matter for employers' hiring decisions, suggesting that subsequent work experience eliminates this negative signal and that workers understand that worker/firm matching takes time.
Journal ArticleDOI
Experimental Research on Labor Market Discrimination
TL;DR: There has been substantial growth in experimental research on labor market discrimination, although the earliest experiments were done decades ago as mentioned in this paper. But far more of it is done in the field, which makes this particular area of experimental research unique relative to the explosion of experimental economic research more generally.
Posted Content
Unobservable Selection and Coefficient Stability: Theory and Validation
Emily Oster,Emily Oster +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a bounding argument was proposed to replace the coefficient movement heuristic, which is informative only if selection on observables is proportional to selection on unobservables.
Book ChapterDOI
Field Experiments on Discrimination
Marianne Bertrand,Esther Duflo +1 more
TL;DR: This paper reviewed the existing field experimentation literature on the prevalence of discrimination, the consequences of such discrimination, and possible approaches to undermine it and highlighted key gaps in the literature and ripe opportunities for future field work.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment
TL;DR: In this paper, a job-specific shock process in the matching model of unemployment with non-cooperative wage behavior is modeled and the authors obtain endogenous job creation and job destruction processes and study their properties.
Journal ArticleDOI
Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
TL;DR: The authors study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers and find that white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than African-Americans.
Journal ArticleDOI
Looking into the Black Box: A Survey of the Matching Function
TL;DR: This paper surveys the microfoundations, empirical evidence, and estimation issues underlying the aggregate matching function and discusses spatial aggregation issues, and implications of on-the-job search and of the timing of stocks and flows for estimated matching functions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Learning from the behavior of others : conformity, fads, and informational cascades
TL;DR: The authors argue that the theory of observational learning, and particularly of informational cascades, has much to offer economics, business strategy, political science, and the study of criminal behavior, which can help explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena about human behavior.
Book
The European unemployment dilemma
TL;DR: The authors used a general equilibrium search model in which workers accumulate skills on the job and lose skills during unemployment, and impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such as the ongoing restructuring from manufacturing to the service industry, adoption of new information technologies, and rapidly changing international economy.