Job Search Strategy, Expected Wages, and Sectoral Movers and Stayers

This paper develops theories of multi-sector search by unemployed workers. The paper then attempts to distinguish empirically whether unemployed workers target their job search efforts exclusively on a particular sector at any point in time, or whether they search in a 'non-targeted' fashion across all sectors. We look at two types of sectoral movements -- between occupation and between industry. We employ both a standard probit formulation and a 'competing -risk' formulation (to estimate the semiparametric hazard into the pre-unemployment sector and an alternative sector). The common implications of both models are supported by the results, which provide strong support for multi-sector search formulations over single-sector formulations. However, we are unable to distinguish empirically between the alternative models of multi-sector search.