Do Digital Information Technologies Help Unemployed Job Seekers Find a Job? Evidence from the Broadband Internet Expansion in Germany

Abstract

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How Broadband Internet Affects Labor Market Matching

“…Panel A of Table 7 reports that the employment rate among job seekers with full coverage is 1.6 percentage points higher than the (counterfactual) employment rate of a job seeker with no coverage. While our results are statistically significant and consistent with previous research (e.g., Mansour, 2014 andGürtzgen et al , 2018), the impact corresponds to a relatively modest 2.5 percent increase relative to the dependent mean of 65.9 percent. Notes: This table displays estimation results of transition from unemployment in year t-1 to employment in year t or t+1 (panel A), starting monthly wage in new job following unemployment measured in 2014-USD (panel B), and tenure length in the first job measured in months (panel C) on broadband internet availability rate in year t-1, with t-1 ∈ [2000,2012].…”

“…To the extent that online platforms provide job seekers with more information about potential employers and vice versa, the tenure effect is consistent with the idea that improved access to information increases match quality. et al , , Gürtzgen et al , 2018. A notable exception is Kroft & Pope (2014), who studied how the penetration of the website Craigslist affected local unemployment rates.…”

“…These authors find that, after controlling for observables, the use of online search leads to slightly longer unemployment durations than job seekers who use more traditional search strategies. 6 More recently, Denzer et al (2018) and Gürtzgen et al (2018) use variation in broadband internet availability across German municipalities to study how the internet as a means of job search affects job finding probabilities. We contribute to these studies in two ways.…”

Activating Older Unemployed Individuals: A Case Study of Online Job Search Peer Groups

“…There is initial evidence testifying to the benefits of ICT for finding employment in young and middle-aged individuals. Access to high-speed internet has been shown to improve re-employment rates in Germany [10]. In addition, online job search raised employment chances among young employment seekers in the U.S. by 25% [11].…”

“…While initial research testifies to the benefits of ICT for finding employment in young and middle-aged individuals [10,11,12,13,14,15], little is known about the effectiveness for older unemployed people. To gain insights into the impact of ICT on this target group, we collected and analyzed a unique data set from a randomized field study introducing a digital labor market intervention for unemployed individuals above the age of 50 at the Federal Employment Agency in Germany between February 2019 and March 2020.…”