IMF Working Papers

The Determinants of On-the-job Search: An Empirical Exploration

By Andrés Fuentes

September 1, 2002

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Andrés Fuentes. The Determinants of On-the-job Search: An Empirical Exploration, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 2002) accessed September 19, 2024
Disclaimer: This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF.The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate

Summary

There was a surge in the number of employed people looking for another job in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. In this paper, we present a panel analysis of aggregate data and a cross-section analysis of individual data on on-the-job search in the United Kingdom. We find evidence that the availability of jobs and wage dispersion increase on-the-job search. The importance of these results is twofold. First, to the extent that on-the-job search responds to the tightness of the labor market, it can contribute to explaining the observed cyclical behavior of the unemployment outflow rate. Second, as shown in Fuentes (2002), to the extent that changes in on-the-job search can be explained by factors other than labor market tightness, such as wage dispersion, these shift the unemployment-vacancies relationship (the Beveridge curve) and therefore have a role to play in the determination of unemployment.

Subject: Employment, Labor, Labor markets, Unemployment, Unemployment rate, Wages

Keywords: Earnings equation, Employment, Job search, Job searcher, Job tenure, Labor market, Labor markets, Matching models, Offer arrival rate, On-the-job search, Reservation wage, Search decision, Unemployment, Wage dispersion, Wage distribution, Wages, WP

Publication Details

  • Pages:

    21

  • Volume:

    ---

  • DOI:

    ---

  • Issue:

    ---

  • Series:

    Working Paper No. 2002/156

  • Stock No:

    WPIEA1562002

  • ISBN:

    9781451857412

  • ISSN:

    1018-5941