Worker and Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Classified 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 present new monthly U.S. city-level and national measures of worker and firm search from 1900 to 1938, derived from scanned images of U.S. newspapers. To our knowledge, we are the first to systematically use the “situations-wanted” advertisements placed by job seekers. We document fresh insights into early 20th-century labor market dynamics: (1) worker and firm search efforts are procyclical; (2) posting costs affect advertising behavior and labor search intensity; (3) the Beveridge curve is stable over the last 125 years, with similar shifts following the 1918 flu and Covid-19 pandemic; and (4) regional and gender heterogeneity exists.

Keywords: job search; Great Depression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C82 E24 E32 J64 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65
Date: 2025-07-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedfwp:101410

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DOI: 10.24148/wp2025-13

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