An Empirical Analysis of the Matching Process in the Spanish Public Employment Agencies: The Vacancies

Our work tries to assess the degree to which the matching process of the vacancies managed by the Andalusian public employment agencies (SAE) approaches a theoretical model of the stock-flow type as described by Coles (1994, CEPR) and his collaborators. According to this model, a new vacancy can be "good" (relatively scarce in its labour segment) or "bad" (relatively abundant in its labour segment); this unobservable heterogeneity at the aggregate level determines the probability of coverage of the vacancy and the characteristics of the worker who occupies it. For our study, we work with a sample of 3.565 vacancies registered in the SAE between March 2006 and October 2008. The proposed test requires the estimation of a duration model for the hazard rate of vacancies with multiple exits. A novelty of our test is that it does not require information about the entire stock and flow of candidates of the other side of the market. The main result obtained is the existence of certain evidence in favour of stock-flow matching.