Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Help-Wanted Advertisements

RePEc Short ID: ppe260
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2216-110X

Bi, Huixin; Petrosky-Nadeau, Nicolas; Traum, Nora; Woodward, Greg

doi:10.18651/RWP2025-07

Working Paper Revision

Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Help-Wanted Advertisements

Abstract: We construct new monthly city-level and national measures of firm search for workers from 1900 to 1938, drawing on approximately 5 million scanned help-wanted advertisements from five U.S. newspapers, with breakdowns by gender. We document four main findings: (1) firm search effort is procyclical, declining sharply at the onset of recessions; (2) posting costs affect advertising behavior, but the effect is modest, with an elasticity of −0.09; (3) the U.S. Beveridge curve has been stable for the past 125 years, with matching elasticities of 0.57 pre-WWII and 0.55 post-WWII; and (4) help-wanted advertisements for women are more responsive than those for men to both posting costs and the business cycle.

JEL Classification: C82; E32; J64; N32;

https://doi.org/10.18651/RWP2025-07