Part 1
I investigate job market matching, analyzing how jobseekers distribute their consideration over different segments of the economy and how this affects which job openings help them find employment. Utilizing clicks on an online job portal as a proxy for job consideration, I estimate a differentiated jobs model of which jobs jobseekers are likely to consider, revealing significant heterogeneity based on gender, education, and labor market history. This heterogeneity leads to different consideration scopes, even for two workers located in the same occupation and commuting zone. I examine the effect of job openings on job finding in a monthly hazard regression. The job openings are categorized by their likelihood of jobseeker consideration predicted by my model. I show that the effects of job openings on job finding are highest for openings in a worker’s most considered segments of the economy and decrease with lower predicted consideration. To isolate variation in labor demand from labor supply factors, mass- hiring events are introduced as a measure of job openings. Finally, I differentiate between broad and narrow jobseekers. Broad jobseekers have positive job-finding elasticities to a wider range of job openings than narrow jobseekers. However, the narrow jobseekers, who focus their consideration on few segments of the economy, have much higher job finding elasticities from openings in those segments. I discuss implications for place-based policies and job-search advice.
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Part 2
This paper provides a framework for thinking about how the job search of workers affects the market power of employers. We present a way of thinking about this which encapsulates popular existing models in which employer market power is based on either frictions in labor markets or imperfect substitutability among jobs. We show how this model can be used to compute measures of the extent of employer market power and relates them to popularly used measures of concentration ratios. We use data on the search behaviour of Swiss unemployed to investigate the number of employers being considered by job-seekers using ’clicks’ on vacancies to define consideration sets.