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Do informal referrals lead to better matches? Evidence from a firm's employee referral system
The limited nature of data on employment referrals in large business and household surveys has so far limited our understanding of the relationships among employment referrals, match quality, wage trajectories, and turnover. Using a new, firm-level data set that includes explicit information on whether a worker was referred by a current employee of the company, we are able to provide rich detail on these empirical relationships for a single U.S. corporation, and to test various predictions of theoretical models of labor market referrals. Predictions with which our results align include: 1) ...
Report
The Heterogeneous Impact of Referrals on Labor Market Outcomes
We document a new set of facts regarding the impact of referrals on labor market outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of referrals—those from family and friends and those from business contacts—and different occupations. Then we develop an on-the-job search model that incorporates referrals and calibrate the model to key moments in the data. The calibrated model yields new insights into the roles played by different types of referrals in the match formation process, and provides quantitative estimates of the effects of referrals on ...