We are grateful to Meta Brown and Donghoon Lee for helpful comments about the data, and seminar participants at the Richmond Fed, St. Louis Fed, and CES-Ifo conference. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System or any other institution with which the authors are affiliated. Mondragon thanks the Richmond Fed for their generous support while part of this paper was written. Gorodnichenko thanks the NSF and Sloan Foundation for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
We use panel data 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, and (2) longer-duration job seekers send relatively more applications per week throughout their entire 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 to exert the highest effort. We present evidence in support of this idea.
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