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If workers direct their search to better jobs, the labor market becomes more efficient in theory. We provide novel evidence of directed search for an online job board using data on offered wages, even if employers hide them from applicants. Since explicit-wage ads often target unskilled workers, selection bias affects estimates ignoring hiddenwage ads. We find significant but milder evidence for directed search for hidden (or implicit) wages, suggesting that ad texts and requirements tacitly convey wage information. Moreover, job ad requirements are aligned with their applicants' traits, as predicted in directed search models with heterogeneity.

We estimate and report life-cycle transition probabilities between employment, unemployment and inactivity for male and female workers using Current Population Survey monthly files. We assess the relative importance of each probability in explaining the life-cycle profiles of participation and unemployment rates using a novel decomposition method. A key robust finding is that most differences in participation and unemployment over the life-cycle can be attributed to the probability of leaving employment and the probability of transiting from inactivity to unemployment, while transitions from unemployment to employment (the job finding probability) play secondary roles. We conclude that search models that seek to explain life-cycle work patterns should not ignore transitions to and from inactivity.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of nonsequential employer search with recruiting selection and heterogeneous workers, and characterizes its equilibrium. I depart from the standard search model by allowing firms to simultaneously meet several applicants and choose the best candidate. Recruiting selection is important: firms interview a median of 5 applicants per vacancy and spend 2.5% of their total labor cost -about US$4200 per recruit-in these activities.The model provides an endogenous matching process with heterogeneous workers in which the hazard rate out of unemployment increases in productivity. The model also accounts for the empirical evidence of negative duration dependence of both hazard rates and re-employment wages. Under recruiting selection, lifetime inequality increases relative to the sequential search benchmark because low wage workers go through longer and more volatile unemployment spells, and have less valuable outside options to bargain with firms. I also show that stronger recruiting selection worsens the productivity of the unemployed and may not generate a more efficient job assignment at the aggregate level. Search frictions coupled with recruiting selection generate new kinds of externalities that affect not only transition probabilities, but also the expected productivity of recruited workers.The calibrated model can replicate moments of the distribution of wages and unemployment durations in CPS data. Using this parametrization, I also show that an increase of screening costs reduces inequality and productive efficiency, and decreases negative externalities on other employers.

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Artículo de publicación ISIWe estimate life-cycle transition probabilities among employment, unemployment and inactivity for US workers. We assess the importance of each worker flow to account for participation and unemployment rates over the life cycle. We find that inactivity exit and entry matter but the empirically relevant margins defy conventional wisdom: high youth unemployment is due to high employment exit probabilities, while low labour force entry probabilities substantially account for low participation and unemployment among older workers. Our results remain intact under several forms of heterogeneity, time-aggregation bias and misclassification errors.Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness ECO2012-32392 Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in RD SEV-2011-0075 Fondecyt 1120593 1111045

T his paper introduces a rational choice model for multiple kinds of participation to empirically investigate several theoretical determinants of social capital (SC) formation. The framework is rich enough to investigate the importance of individual variables, social/peer effects, endogenous trust, political-institutional, and inequality factors as sources of participation. We show that the aforementioned contextual factors explain SC formation for Chile, but their relative importance varies for each kind of participation. Our second application compares individual-level determinants of SC formation among the largest democracies in the Americas. Gender, age, education, and race show heterogeneous effects across countries. Overall, negative interpersonal trust shocks generate participation increments, and possibly motivate engagement in trustworthy networks. Idiosyncratic factors behind participation and trust are positively correlated, suggesting a common SC stem that manifests in multiple ways. Hence, our empirical approach to SC formation uncovers factors hidden by assumptions in some previous literature.

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