TY  - RPRT
        AU  - DellaVigna, Stefano
AU  - Heining, Jörg
AU  - Schmieder, Johannes F.
AU  - Trenkle, Simon
        TI  - Evidence on Job Search Models from a Survey of Unemployed Workers in Germany
        PY  - 2020/Apr/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 13189
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp13189
        AB  - The job finding rate of Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients declines in the initial months of unemployment and then exhibits a spike at the benefit exhaustion point. A range of theoretical explanations have been proposed, but those are hard to disentangle using data on job finding alone. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, we conducted a large text-message-based survey of unemployed workers in Germany. We surveyed 6,800 UI recipients twice a week for 4 months about their job search effort. 
The panel structure allows us to observe how search effort evolves within individual over the unemployment spell. We provide three key facts: 1) search effort is flat early on in the UI spell, 2) search effort exhibits an increase up to UI exhaustion and a decrease thereafter, 3) UI recipients do not appear to time job start dates to coincide with the UI exhaustion point. A model of reference-dependent job search can explain these facts well, while a standard search model with unobserved heterogeneity struggles to explain the second fact. The third fact also leaves little room for a model of storable offers to explain the spike.
        KW  - survey
KW  - job search
KW  - unemployment
KW  - reference dependence
        ER  -