DONDENA Seminar - Rafael Lalive
“Adapting to Scarcity: Job Search and Recruiting Across Occupational Boundaries”
SPEAKER: Rafael Lalive (University of Lausanne)
ABSTRACT:
We analyze how overlap in job requirements and labor market conditions affect recruiters' and job seekers' search across occupational boundaries. We leverage unique click data from a job and recruitment platform linked to Swiss unemployment register records. We develop a novel measure of occupational similarity that quantifies the overlap in job requirements in vacancy postings between and within occupations. Overlap strongly determines job seekers' clicks on jobs in other occupations and recruiters' contacts of candidates from other occupations. However, job seekers' last occupation is also important. Job seekers and recruiters are substantially more likely to focus on jobs or candidates in the same occupation than in other occupations with the same overlap. Finally, the importance of the last occupation varies with scarcity. If tightness in an occupation increases, job seekers are less likely to consider switching occupation while recruiters are more inclined to contact candidates from other occupations, particularly those from similar, lower-paying occupations. A key novelty of these analyses is to demonstrate recruiters' important role in moderating job seekers' ability to change occupations.
BIO:
Rafael Lalive holds a position as a professor in economics at University of Lausanne since September 2006. His main research interests are twofold. On one hand, he works on the economic effects of reforms to public policy. Specifically, his research has focused on the effectiveness of active labor market programs in helping job seekers find jobs, on the role of financial incentives in unemployment insurance, on the effects of parental leave policies on fertility and return to work of mother of newborn children, on policies for disabled individuals and on the effects of environmental policies. On the other hand, he is interested in social economics, i.e. the importance of social interactions for education decisions and the role of social learning. His research has been published by major journals in economics such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Review of Economics and Statistics and also general science journals such as Science or PLOSone. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn (IZA) and an affiliate of CEPR and IFAU. Rafael Lalive earned a PhD in labor economics from University of Zurich in 20021, and was an invited scholar at the Center for Labor Economics at UC Berkeley in 2014 and at Tinbergen Institute in Amsterdam in the academic year 2002 to 2003. He advised the Swiss government on Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021.