Evidence on Job Search Models from a Survey of Unemployed Workers in Germany

Stefano DellaVigna, Jörg Heining (joerg.heining@iab.de), Johannes Schmieder and Simon Trenkle (trenkle@iza.org)
Additional contact information
Jörg Heining: Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg
Simon Trenkle: IZA and IAB

No 13189, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: survey; job search; unemployment; reference dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 J64 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 108 pages
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Published - published in: Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, 137 (2), 1181 - 1232

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Related works:
Journal Article: Evidence on Job Search Models from a Survey of Unemployed Workers in Germany (2023)
Working Paper: Evidence on job search models from a survey of unemployed workers in Germany (2020)
Working Paper: Evidence on Job Search Models from a Survey of Unemployed Workers in Germany (2020)
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