Cheap search, picky workers? Evidence from a field experiment

Harald Mayr

No 403, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Search frictions impede the labor market. Despite this indisputable fact, it is a priori unclear how job search costs affect search duration and unemployment: lower search costs make it easier to find a job, reducing search duration and unemployment, but may also increase the reservation wage, increasing search duration and unemployment. I collaborate with a recruiting company to directly test the effects of lower search costs in a field experiment among approximately 400 IT professionals in Switzerland. I find that workers are more likely to search for detailed job information, but not to file a job application, when search costs are lower. These findings are consistent with an increase in the reservation wage. Lower search costs might lead to picky workers, but fail to ultimately reduce search duration and unemployment.

Keywords: Job search; search costs; search frictions; recruiting; reservation wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J63 J64 M50 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/216716/1/econwp403.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cheap search, picky workers? Evidence from a field experiment (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().