Measuring job openings: evidence from Swedish plant level data

Niels-Jakob Harbo hansen ()
Additional contact information
Niels-Jakob Harbo hansen: IIES, Postal: Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) Stockholm University

No 2019:27, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: In modern macroeconomic models job openings are a key component. Thus, when taking these models to the data we need an empirical counterpart to the theoretical concept of job openings. To achieve this, the literature relies on job vacancies measured either in survey or register data. Insofar as this concept captures the concept of job openings well we should see a tight relationship between vacancies and subsequent hires on the micro level. To investigate this, I analyze a new data set of Swedish hires and job vacancies on the plant level covering the period 2001-2012. I find that vacancies contain little power in predicting hires above (i) whether the number of vacancies is positive and (ii) plant size. Building on this, I propose an alternative measure of job openings in the economy. This measure has the features of (i) better predicting hiring at the plant level and (ii) providing a better fitting aggregate matching function vis-à-vis the traditional vacancy measure.

Keywords: Job opening; vacancies; labour supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2019-12-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2019/wp-20 ... ngs-harbo-hansen.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:hhs:ifauwp:2019_027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).