Duration Dependence and Labor Market Conditions: Evidence from a Field Experiment*
通过向美国100个城市的真实招聘岗位投递虚构简历，研究发现失业时间越长，获得面试回电的可能性越低，且这种负面效应在劳动力市场紧张时更强。
Abstract This article studies the role of employer behavior in generating “negative duration dependence”—the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell—by sending fictitious résumés to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker’s unemployment spell, with the majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months. We explore how this effect varies with local labor market conditions and find that duration dependence is stronger when the local labor market is tighter. This result is consistent with the prediction of a broad class of screening models in which employers use the unemployment spell length as a signal of unobserved productivity and recognize that this signal is less informative in weak labor markets.