Finding a Job in the Internet Age

Internet job searching offers an empirical setting in which to explore the trade-off between quality and quantity of information. As both firms and workers turn to the internet for unprecedented amounts of labor market information, it is unclear whether this makes the matching process more efficient. Using longitudinal data on two samples of unemployed job searchers in 1998 and 2000, I establish the rise of the internet as a job-search strategy and assess whether searching online increased the short-term probability offinding a job. Results suggest the internet's contribution to an unemployed searcher's information pool may afford a small advantage only to the extent that other job searchers are not using it, perhaps'due to an inverse relationship between search and screening costs in a two-sided market. Disparities in labor market outcomes are due not only to the individual and human capital characteristics of workers and the requirements and rewards of jobs but also to the process through which workers are matched with jobs (Granovetter 1981;Sorensen and Kalleberg 1981).This matching process depends crucially on the availability of information, which is costly but vital for both workers and employers. Since neither parties have perfect information, much