Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Help-Wanted Advertisements

Huixin Bi, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Nora Traum and Greg Woodward
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Greg Woodward: https://www.kansascityfed.org/authors/greg-woodward/

No 2025-13, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Abstract: We construct new monthly city-level and national measures of firm search for workers from 1900 to 1938, drawing on approximately 5 million scanned help-wanted advertisements from five U.S. newspapers, with breakdowns by gender. We document four main findings: (1) firm search effort is procyclical, declining sharply at the onset of recessions; (2) posting costs affect advertising behavior, but the effect is modest, with an elasticity of -0.0$; (3) the U.S. Beveridge curve has been stable for the past 125 years, with matching elasticities of 0.57 pre-WWII and 0.55 post-WWII; and (4) help-wanted advertisements for women are more responsive than those for men to both posting costs and the business cycle.

Keywords: help wanted; job vacancies; historical data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C82 E32 J64 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2026-05-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: Original paper published 7/22/2025, under original title- Worker and Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Classified Advertisements
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Related works:
Working Paper: Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Help-Wanted Advertisements (2026)
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DOI: 10.24148/wp2025-13

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