Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 29 October 2025, LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 29 October 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Andreas Müller (University of Zurich) will be talking about “The Ins and Outs of Vacancies”.
More information can be found here:
This paper uses large-scale high-frequency data on vacancy flows and matched employer-employee data from Austria to document the cyclicality of vacancy flows and their contribution to variation in the vacancy stock. We document four key facts: (1) Vacancy inflows explain at least one-third of the cyclical variation in the vacancy stock, whereas the remainder is explained by vacancy fillings; (2) vacancy lapses, while accounting for about 20% of vacancy outflows, are acyclical and do not contribute to variation in the stock; (3) replacement vacancies, i.e. vacancies posted following a quit of a worker to another firm, are a key driver of vacancy inflows over the business cycle; and (4) the composition of vacancy inflows varieslittle over the business cycle and cannot account for the cyclical variation in vacancy filling. We set up a search-and-matching model with fixed costs of vacancy posting and on-the-job search, and calibrate it to match the averages of vacancy flows. The calibrated model highlights the crucial role of on-the-job search – particularly replacement hires – in explaining the observed importance of vacancy inflows for cyclical fluctuations in the vacancy rate.