Acquiring skilled workers can be a key comparative advantage for firms. However, this process involves much uncertainty that firms need to navigate. Leveraging managers' social networks can help reduce search frictions, improve match quality, and boost firm performance. In this paper, we...

This study estimates and decomposes recruitment elasticity, a key measure of employer market power, across job-matching stages using data from Japan's largest job-matching intermediary. On average, recruitment elasticity is negative but not statistically significantly different from zero....

We study the gendered impact of recommendations at different stages of the hiring process. First, using a large sample of reference letters from the academic job market for economists, we document that women receive fewer "ability" and more "grindstone" letters. Next, we conduct two experiments...

Employers sometimes use personality tests in hiring or specifically look for candidates with certain personality traits such as being social, outgoing, active, and extraverted. Therefore, they hire based on personality, specifically extraversion in part at least. The question arises whether this...