There comes a time when every young (or not so young!) scientist needs to find a job. It doesn’t matter whether you’re searching for a post-doc position, a professorship or a job in the biotech industry, there is a multitude of job-search and career resources on the web. The first stop in your job search should be the online versions of Science, Nature and Cell. Although these sites carry the s...

The rate of job-to-job transitions is twice as large today as the rate at which workers move from employment to unemployment. I demonstrate that, under plausible specifications, the basic job-ladder model — the workhorse model of the literature on on-the-job search — has no chance of matching the extent of job-to-job transitions. Moreover, it cannot account for the low search effort exerted by ...

We develop and empirically test a labor market model with Public Employment Agencies (PEA) in order to understand why not all vacancies use the costless services provided by the PEA. We show that both the search market and the PEA can be active in equilibrium. In such an equilibrium, workers with a higher productivity have a higher chance of receiving a job offer and hence a higher value of sea...

Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) emphasizes the potential impact of contextual barriers on vocational self-efficacy, interests, and goals. However, most tests of SCCT to date have focused exclusively on person-level, perceptual barriers rather than objective, macroeconomic barriers that may influence large groups of people. In this study, we examine how the effects of personal experiences ...

We propose an equilibrium theory of learning from search in the labor market, which addresses the search behavior of workers, the creation of jobs, and the determination of wages as functions of labor market histories. In the model, each worker has incomplete information about his job-finding ability and learns about it from his search outcomes. The theory formalizes a notion akin to discourage...