Duration Dependence and Job Search over the Spell: Evidence from Job Seeker Activity Reports

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cederlöf, Jonas, Roman, Sara
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Cederlöf, Jonas
Roman, Sara
author_facet Cederlöf, Jonas
Roman, Sara
contents We study how job search behavior evolves over the unemployment spell and the extent to which job seekers experience duration dependence in callbacks. Leveraging data on 2.4 million monthly activity reports containing detailed information on job applications, interviews, and other search activities, we separate within-spell changes from dynamic selection with a time-and-spell fixed effects design. We find that raw search effort increases with unemployment duration, but this pattern reflects dynamic selection: within-spell search effort remains flat and declines sharply in the months preceding re-employment. Around unemployment insurance (UI) exhaustion, search effort drops by approximately 10%, likely due to participation in labor market programs crowding out job search. Reported interviews indicate that callbacks decline by 6% per month, but only 10--14% of this decline reflects ``true'' duration dependence. Finally, we document substantial heterogeneity: search effort and duration dependence vary strongly by age, and job seekers in tight labor markets experience about 50% more duration dependence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03377
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Duration Dependence and Job Search over the Spell: Evidence from Job Seeker Activity Reports
Cederlöf, Jonas
Roman, Sara
General Economics
Economics
We study how job search behavior evolves over the unemployment spell and the extent to which job seekers experience duration dependence in callbacks. Leveraging data on 2.4 million monthly activity reports containing detailed information on job applications, interviews, and other search activities, we separate within-spell changes from dynamic selection with a time-and-spell fixed effects design. We find that raw search effort increases with unemployment duration, but this pattern reflects dynamic selection: within-spell search effort remains flat and declines sharply in the months preceding re-employment. Around unemployment insurance (UI) exhaustion, search effort drops by approximately 10%, likely due to participation in labor market programs crowding out job search. Reported interviews indicate that callbacks decline by 6% per month, but only 10--14% of this decline reflects ``true'' duration dependence. Finally, we document substantial heterogeneity: search effort and duration dependence vary strongly by age, and job seekers in tight labor markets experience about 50% more duration dependence.
title Duration Dependence and Job Search over the Spell: Evidence from Job Seeker Activity Reports
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03377