Job Seekers’ Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias
利用求职者对找到工作的主观信念，发现信念能预测就业结果但存在乐观偏差，且异质性导致的动态选择解释了大部分失业持续时间依赖。
This paper uses job seekers’ elicited beliefs about job finding to disentangle the sources of the decline in job-finding rates by duration of unemployment. We document that beliefs have strong predictive power for job finding, but are not revised downward when remaining unemployed and are subject to optimistic bias, especially for the long-term unemployed. Leveraging the predictive power of beliefs, we find substantial heterogeneity in job finding with the resulting dynamic selection explaining most of the observed negative duration dependence in job finding. Moreover, job seekers’ beliefs underreact to heterogeneity in job finding, distorting search behavior and increasing long-term unemployment.