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How can vacancy statistics be used to measure friction in job matching and the effects of friction on unemployment? First, measure deviations from instantaneous hirings by the average duration of recruitment as measured by the number of job vacancies divided by the number of hirings per month....

Between 1990 and 1998 there was an increase by 4 percentage points of couples where both individuals were college educated, so-called power couples, in Swedish cities. During the same period, the shares of non-college educated couples and college educated singles increased by only 1 percentage...

We use data on 19 000 siblings to investigate whether earnings vary among students who graduated from different colleges in Sweden. We run separate within-family regressions for whole siblings, sisters and brothers. The results show that earnings vary significantly among students who have...

Firms create ‘vacancies’ in one sense (recruitment processes) in order to avoid ‘vacancies’ in another sense (unmet demand). The paper clarifies the different roles of these two concepts in labour market analysis, not only when interpreting Beveridge curves and matching functions, but...

We analyze unique data that identify whether individuals have participated in decentralized wage setting and whether they have negotiated their own wages. Wages are significantly higher for those who have been part of a formalized wage-setting process compared with non-participants, but only in...

While the matching function relates hirings (H) to vacancies (V) and unemployment, the duration function relates the average duration of vacancies as measured by V/H to unemployment. Shifts of the duration function are equivalent to shifts of the matching function but easier to interpret....

This paper first clarifies the distinction between vacancies as ‘job openings’ (recruitment processes), which are measured in traditional vacancy statistics, and vacancies as ‘unfilled jobs’ (unmet labour demand). It then presents a method of measuring unmet demand in enterprise surveys...

This paper is, firstly, a reappraisal of the matching function, arguing that the proper specification of the relation between hirings (H), vacancies (V), and unemployment is the duration function, which shows how average recruitment times as measured by V/H depend on unemployment and other...

This study uses employer-employee linked data on all Swedish firms to analyze the impact of a college on the local economy. It focuses on colleges established in the 1970s and measures the effects 20 years after the establishment. The results show that there are no significant effects on...