RWP 25-07, July 2025; updated May 2026
We construct new monthly city-level and national measures of firm search for workers from 1900 to 1938, drawing on approximately 5 million scanned help-wanted advertisements from five U.S. newspapers, with breakdowns by gender. We document four main findings: (1) firm search effort is procyclical, declining sharply at the onset of recessions; (2) posting costs affect advertising behavior, but the effect is modest, with an elasticity of -0.09; (3) the U.S. Beveridge curve has been stable for the past 125 years, with matching elasticities of 0.57 pre-WWII and 0.55 post-WWII; and (4) help-wanted advertisements for women are more responsive than those for men to both posting costs and the business cycle.
JEL classifications: J64, N32, E24, E32, C82
Article Citation
Bi, Huixin, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Nora Traum, and Greg Woodward. 2025. "Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Help-Wanted Advertisements." Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Research Working Paper no. 25-07, August. Available at External Linkhttps://doi.org/10.18651/RWP2025-07
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City or the Federal Reserve System.
Authors
Huixin Bi
Research and Policy Officer
