Building a composite Help-Wanted Index over 1951-2009

This paper presents a measure of vacancy posting that captures the behavior of total --print and online-- help-wanted advertising. By modeling the share of online job advertising as the diffusion of a new technology --online job posting and job search-- I can combine information on both print and online help-wanted advertising. I use this consistent measure of vacancy posting over 1951-2009 to estimate the elasticity of the matching function and find an estimate of 0.58.