Original source
Why Don’t Jobseekers Search More? Barriers and Returns to Search on a Job Matching Platform (2024)
Research manuscript
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Used in these cards
Subjective Return Belief Invariance
"Table C.8 shows that treatment does not shift jobseekers' answers to either of these questions... The survey data show that treatment does not increase respondents' perceptions of the average values of V or P on the platform."
Constant Returns to Marginal Job Search Effort
"Using treatment as an instrument for applying shows that marginal applications submitted due to treatment have a 5.9% probability of yielding interviews, which is neither substantively nor statistically different from the 6.3% probability for applications from the control group."
Forced Random Search Decreasing Returns
"Listing vacancies first produces more applications with decreasing, rather than constant, returns... the average interview probability for marginal applications submitted because the vacancy was listed first is 2.4%... sharply decreasing returns."
Jobseeker Attribute Selection Invariance
"Marginal and inframarginal applications come from jobseekers with similar observed characteristics... mean education and CV quality scores... are almost identical for the marginal and inframarginal applications."
Off-Platform Search Non-Displacement
"Any employment effect is unlikely to be driven by treatment effects on off-platform search, which are negative but close to zero at the extensive and several intensive margins."
Partially Directed Search under Behavioral Friction
"Control group jobseekers miss many high-value matches... but the share of total applications sent to each quintile does not differ between treatment and control groups."
Insignificance of Pecuniary and Time Search Costs
"This callback request treatment has an effect one quarter of the size of the main phone call treatment... free callback reminder treatment has an effect one hundredth of the size... showing that time costs... can explain only a small share of the effect."
Positional List-Order Choice Bias
"31% of applications go to the first vacancy listed on the call in both the treatment and control groups... jobseekers are disproportionately likely to apply to first-listed vacancies, but this pattern does not differ between treated and control jobseekers."
Psychological Costs of Application Initiation
"An experiment that changes the default process for initiating job applications increases applications by 600% on a search platform in Pakistan."
Salience vs. Initiation Mechanism Disambiguation
"Table C.4 shows that the effect of the reminder message is one-fourteenth as large as the effect of the phone call (p < 0.001)... showing that reminder effects do not explain the intervention's impact."
Suboptimally Low Search Effort
"The finding of constant returns to marginal applications, combined with limited spillovers onto other jobseekers, raises the possibility of suboptimally low search effort."
Time-Varying Psychological Application Costs
"We view time-varying psychological costs of initiating applications as a reasonable explanation for our main experimental findings... the same jobseeker will experience similar returns to applications submitted in untreated periods and in treated periods."
Vacancy Competition Non-Congestion
"Estimates of spillover effects are small and not statistically significant... taking these factors together, it is possible that firms in this labor market receive too few suitable applications in the absence of treatment for crowd-out to be relevant."
Application Window Timing Decay
"The treatment effect on applying is 0.072 percentage points lower (standard error 0.004) with each extra day between the notification and the deadline."