Job listing renewal with phantom vacancies
Bruno Decreuse  1@  
1 : Aix-Marseille School of Economics  (AMSE)  -  Website
Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
GREQAM, Centre de la Charité, 2 rue de la Charité, 13236 Marseille Cedex 02 -  France

On job boards, obsolete information leads job seekers to apply for young vacancies and employers to renew their listings. This paper provides a search equilibrium model of unemployment that rationalizes this claim. Setting up a job comes at a fixed cost and renewing the ad is cheaper. Match formation creates phantom vacancies and workers condition their search on the listing age. We calibrate the model on US aggregate data and examine its (steady-state) response to productivity shocks. In bad times, firms create few new jobs, renew their ads more frequently and job seekers concentrate their search on young listings. There are many phantom vacancies as a result, which contributes to matching frictions and unemployment.


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