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Search Behavior

  • Project title: Job Search Behavior of the Unemployed
  • Funded by: German Research Foundation (DFG)
  • Project duration: 2008-2011
  • Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Marco Caliendo, Dr. Arne Uhlendorff (U Mannheim)
  • Participant(s): Ricarda Schmidl (IZA)

Short Description

Analyzing the determinants of differential transition patterns from unemployment to employment for individuals with perceivably similar labor market characteristics is an important subject of labor market research. This research project aims to fill the gap in the literature on this topic, making use of a novel dataset, the IZA Evaluation Dataset. This dataset consists of a representative inflow sample into unemployment, and contains detailed information on usually unknown individual characteristics as well as job search choices of the unemployed. This allows us to analyze the determinants of reservation wages and the type and intensity of job search as well as their impact on unemployment duration. In particular, we investigate the role of individual characteristics (as personality traits, social networks) in the job search process, as well as the impact of active labor market policies. Our results so far indicate that differences in the potential duration of unemployment benefit receipt as well as differences in personality traits and in subjective expectations about participation probabilities in active labor market policy programs lead to heterogeneity in the search behavior and in the transition probabilities into employment.

Publications