Research

The death of distance in hiring

I estimate the impact of online job boards on the geography of labour markets. I find that the US cities with earlier access to online recruitment experienced an increase in migration flows in and out of the city accompanied by an increase in wages. To understand the underlying mechanism, I collect a novel data set on firm recruitment across space. I show that firms hire outside of their local labour market to find workers of a specific skill rather than low-wage, unemployed labour. As a result, the reduction in the effective distance between local labour markets increased sorting across cities in jobs with high return to match quality. This mechanism contributed to the divergence in outcomes between US cities. 

Moving to look or looking to move? The role of job search in migration decisions  

reject & resubmit at Review of Economic Dynamics; covered by The Wall Street Journal - Real Time Economics Blog

Firm concentration & job design: the case of schedule flexible work arrangements  

[with Abi Adams-Prassl, Matthias Qian and Tom Waters]

submitted; earlier version as IZA Discussion Paper here

Job displacement and migrant labor market assimilation

[with Hannah Illing]

reject & resubmit at Journal of Labor Economics

Labour market frictions and regional disparities 

Wage information and applicant selection 

[with Lukas Hensel and Marc Witte]

We run a field experiment in Ethiopia to understand whether providing salary information in job postings can make the labor market work more efficiently, in particular by improving the selection of jobseekers applying to vacancies.

A star was born: how workers respond to politically-charged job postings 

[with Pawel Adrjan, Jonas Jessen, Simon Jaeger and Jason Sockin]

While the German language is gendered toward males, the ``gender star'' is a punctuation that allows for words to be interpreted as gender-neutral. Its usage however is highly politically polarizing. We use over 40 million online job postings from 2016 to 2023 to document the prevalence of the gender star in the German labor market and study how jobseekers respond when the job title in an advertisement is explicitly gender-neutral. 

Job search during a pandemic recession: survey evidence from the Netherlands 

[with Nico Pestel, Simon Trenkle and Christian Zimplemann]

Labour Economics (2022); pdf here; earlier version as IZA Discussion Paper here