Journal Article

Help-wanted advertising and job vacancies


Abstract: Due to its reliance on newspaper advertising, the help-wanted index is an indirect measure of job vacancies. However, the level of job advertisements appearing in newspapers may change for reasons that are unrelated to overall labor demand. For example, equal employment opportunity laws raised the level of newspaper job advertising in the 1960s and 1970s, while internet job advertising has served as an increasingly effective substitute for newspaper advertising in recent years. In this Economic Letter, I discuss how the help-wanted index can be adjusted for such factors, yielding a more reliable measure of short-term and long-term movements in job vacancies.

Keywords: Employment (Economic theory);

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Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Part of Series: FRBSF Economic Letter

Publication Date: 2005

Order Number: 02