Evidence on job search models from a survey of unemployed workers in Germany

Arbeitspapier

The job finding rate of Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients declines in the initial months of unemployment and then exhibits a spike at the benefit exhaustion point. A range of theoretical explanations have been proposed, but those are hard to disentangle using data on job finding alone. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, we conducted a large text-message-based survey of unemployed workers in Germany. We surveyed 6,800 UI recipients twice a week for 4 months about their job search effort. The panel structure allows us to observe how search effort evolves within individual over the unemployment spell. We provide three key facts: 1) search effort is flat early on in the UI spell, 2) search effort exhibits an increase up to UI exhaustion and a decrease thereafter, 3) UI recipients do not appear to time job start dates to coincide with the UI exhaustion point. A model of reference-dependent job search can explain these facts well, while a standard search model with unobserved heterogeneity struggles to explain the second fact. The third fact also leaves little room for a model of storable offers to explain the spike.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: IAB-Discussion Paper ; No. 13/2020

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search ; Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡
• Thema: Job search ; Reference dependence ; Survey ; Unemployment

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Della Vigna, Stefano ; Heining, Jörg ; Schmieder, Johannes ; Trenkle, Simon
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB)
• (wo): Nürnberg
• (wann): 2020

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/222398
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:41 MEZ