Abstract
We develop and validate a measure of job search based on Google search data and use it to study the effects of unemployment insurance (UI). We show that individuals on UI search 30% less than the unemployed not on UI and that claimants close to UI exhaustion search twice as much as claimants with over 30 weeks left. We use our estimates to calibrate a model of job finding and find that the decrease in job search due to UI expansions was responsible for an increase in the unemployment rate of less than 0.1% in Texas between 2008 and 2009.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Social Science Research Network (SSRN) |
| Number of pages | 46 |
| State | Published - Jun 29 2014 |
