The Intensity of Job Search and Search Duration

Theorise of job search have been formulated to explain this aspect of economic behavior and to arrive at policy recommendations that might be useful in affecting it. Although there are many variants of job search theory, most share several elements in common. Typically, these theorise view unemployed workers as not simply desiring any job, but a job that maximizes their expected future income. Consequently, the job searcher is assumed to be willing to pass up job offers that do not meet his or her expectations. We use panel date on individual applications to job openings on a job search website to study search intensity and search duration. our data allow us to control for the composition of job seekers and changes in the number of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that (1) the number of applications sent by a job seeker declines over the duration of search. The latter finding contradicts the implications of standard labor search models. We argue that these models fail to capture an income effect in search effort that causes job seekers with the lowest returns to search effort that causes job seekers with the lowest returns to search to exert the highest effort.