The effect of regional internet availability on search and matching outcomes

互联网作为一种大众媒介的出现，导致获取和传播信息的成本急剧下降。在劳动力市场的背景下，可能受到互联网影响的主要特征之一是工人和雇主如何寻找对方并最终形成匹配。拟议项目的目标是确定互联网的出现对劳动力市场运作的影响，特别是搜索和匹配结果。我们提出的研究的一个新特点是，我们将以前主要关注求职者求职行为的证据扩展到代表雇主的招聘和寻找。在研究互联网在求职、招聘和匹配结果方面的作用时，一个关键挑战是发现互联网可获得性和/或使用率的外生变化，因为个人和雇主可能会自我选择不同的搜索渠道。为了解决这个问题，我们计划采用Falck等人(2014)提出的识别策略。这种方法利用了21世纪初德国推出第一代DSL技术的技术限制导致的地区互联网可用性的外生差异。

The emergence of the internet as a mass medium has led to a dramatic decline in the cost of acquiring and disseminating information. In the context of labor markets, one of the major features that are likely to be affected by the internet is the way how workers and employers search for each other and eventually form a match. The goal of the proposed project is to identify the effect of the emergence of the internet on the functioning of labor markets, with a particular focus on search and matching outcomes. A novel feature of our proposed study is that we extend the previous evidence, which has primarily focused on job seekers´ job search behavior, to recruiting and search on behalf of employers. A key challenge in studying the role of the internet on job search, recruiting and matching outcomes is to find exogenous variation in internet availability and/or usage as individuals as well as employers are likely to self-select into different search channels. To address this issue, we plan to adopt the identification strategy put forward by Falck et al (2014). This approach exploits exogenous variation in regional internet availability caused by technological restrictions of the roll-out of the first generation DSL technology in the early 2000s in Germany.