One goal of the public employment service is to facilitate matching between unemployed job seekers and job vacancies; another goal is to monitor job search so as to bring search efforts among the unemployed in line with search requirements. The referral of job seekers to vacancies is one instrument used for these purposes. We report results from a randomized Swedish experiment where the outcome...

This paper studies the impact of long-run productivity growth on job …nding and separation rates, and thus the unemployment rate, using a search and matching model. We incorporate disembodied technological progress and on-the-job search into the endogenous job separation model of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994). The incorporation of on-the-job search allows faster growth to reduce unemployment ...

The job search literature suggests that an increase in the proportion of job seekers who are employed reduces the probability of unemployed people finding a job. However, there is little evidence indicating that employed and unemployed job seekers have similar observed characteristics or that they apply for the same jobs. We use the British Labour Force Survey to compare employed and unemployed...

Previous unemployment research has directly tested hypotheses derived from expectancy-value theory (EVT; Feather, 1982, 1990), but no comparative analysis has been executed with another motivational framework. In one large study with 446 unemployed people, separate analyses provided good evidence for predictions derived from both EVT and self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000)....