Unemployment has long been considered a risk factor for mental health. While jobsearch is an extremely draining and stressful process, the job-search systems thatjobseekers use do not have to be. Among the many pressuring factors that are known tocontribute to stress, it remains unexplored how job search systems UX impactsjobseekers. This study aimed at identifying and understanding job search systemsrelated stressors based on existing stressor characteristics and on stressless designheuristics. To achieve this goal, semi-structured interviews were conducted incombination with a survey. Thematic analysis was performed to identify themes; and asurvey was conducted to gather the broader sentiment on job search experience.The results show that existing stressless design heuristics are effective in thinkingdesign for stress; as new themes emerged, three new heuristics are proposed.The 3 main stressors identified are related to poor UX in terms of feedback systems,complex interactions to fill in application forms, poor job description quality combinedwith a wanting job search capability. The major reasoning for the identified stressors isthat they are perceived as hindrances towards the main goal – getting a job.Stressor’s impact appears in the form of lowering job search engagement and makingjobseekers develop a negative attitude towards online job search.One important finding is that these stressors only become visible over time; this mighthave an implication on how software is tested and evaluated for stress. The findingswere discussed in view of previous studies, practical and scientific implications arepresented as well as suggestions for future research.

This study examines the effect of a short term (30 min) self-efficacy intervention on job search behavior and job search related state-anxiety then proposes a sequential mediation model. Using a sample (N = 272) college students recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 160) and a small liberal arts college in California (N = 112), participants completed a job search skills quiz and were randomly assigned to a positive feedback condition. They then immediately filled out self-report measures for self-efficacy (Career Decision Making Self-Efficacy), state anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Form Y), and job search behavior (Proactive Career Behavior Measure). The results suggest that a positive effect of the intervention on job search behaviors is mediated by a reduction in anxiety and increase in career decision making self-efficacy. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for college career counselors will be discussed.

Unemployment and precarity have become key features of 21st century work. Employability is presented as a solution to these issues. Individuals are exhorted to manage their employability, in order to be able to exercise choice in the labour market. While employability is individuals' responsibility, governments, employers and educational bodies simply provide opportunities for its development. Higher education is a key site for this process, as employability rhetoric increasingly informs policy and practice. It is founded on rhetoric that emphasises flexibility, skills and marketability, shaping students in certain ways with the risk of being deemed unemployable as the consequence of disengagement. At the same time, there has been a rise in employer presence on university campuses. Recruitment is no longer its key feature. Traditional 'milkround' recruitment has been replaced by year round marketing campaigns. As a result, students are continually exposed to a selection of employers promoting a specific image of work and work orientations. The theoretical framework of this study is informed by works of Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin. Gramsci's notion of 'common sense?' is central to analysing the rhetoric on work and employability present on campus. I also give voice to students by recounting how they as 'dialogical selves' engage with such 'common sense'. These issues are explored through an analysis of data gathered during seventeen months of fieldwork. This includes longitudinal interviews with students, participant observation, documents, interviews with careers advisors and non-participant observation of career consultations. From this, I argue that there was a strongly normative image of work constructed around an orientation I term 'consumption of work'. This image was closely associated with consumption opportunities, marketed to students through corporate presence on campus. 'Consumption of work' was central to shaping students' work orientations and only few of them resisted the 'common sense'. Those who made 'alternative' choices articulated doubt about these, with the challenge to employability as a key reason for it. Employability was presented to students as a lifelong project of the self, where constant acquisition, development and selling of skills were necessary to maintain a position in the labour market. Many students embraced the rhetoric of skill 'possession', but were 'playing the game' when 'demonstrating' skills. Conforming to what the employers were willing them to 'demonstrate' and understanding how to do this became the primary condition for achieving employability.

Föreliggande studie syftade till att undersöka att undersöka potentiella samband mellan socioekonomisk bakgrund och motivation att söka framtida arbete hos studenter. Studien genomfördes med hjälp av en enkät som analyserades kvantitativt, där 90 studenter fick ta ställning till olika scenarion gällande arbeten med variation avseende löne- och kvalifikationsnivå. Data samlades in under fyra föreläsningstillfällen vid Högskolan i Gävle genom en pappersenkät. Resultatet visar att det inte förelåg några signifikanta skillnader vad gäller studenters motivation att söka arbeten och i relation till respondenternas socioekonomiska bakgrund. En tänkbar slutsats är att gruppen studenter är relativt homogena vad avser socioekonomisk bakgrund och därför observerades inga signifikanta resultat. / The present study aimed to investigate whether there was any connection between socioeconomic background and motivation to seek future work of students. The study was conducted using a questionnaire that was analyzed quantitatively, where 90 students had to consider different scenarios regarding work with the variation in wage and level of qualification. Data were collected during four occasions lecture at the University of Gävle through a paper questionnaire. The results show that there were no significant differences in students 'motivation to seek work and in relation to the respondents socioeconomic background. One possible conclusion is that the group of students is relatively homogenous with regard to socioeconomic backgrounds and therefore measured no significant results.

<p>This dissertation consists of three separate essays on job search and labor market dynamics. In the first essay, “The Impact of Labor Market Conditions on Job Creation: Evidence from Firm Level Data”, I study how much changes in labor market conditions reduce employment fluctuations over the business cycle. Changes in labor market conditions make hiring more expensive during expansions and cheaper during recessions, creating counter-cyclical incentives for job creation. I estimate firm level elasticities of labor demand with respect to changes in labor market conditions, considering two margins: changes in labor market tightness and changes in wages. Using employer-employee matched data from Brazil, I find that all firms are more sensitive to changes in wages rather than labor market tightness, and there is substantial heterogeneity in labor demand elasticity across regions. Based on these results, I demonstrate that changes in labor market conditions reduce the variance of employment growth over the business cycle by 20% in a median region, and this effect is equally driven by changes along each margin. Moreover, I show that the magnitude of the effect of labor market conditions on employment growth can be significantly affected by economic policy. In particular, I document that the rapid growth of the national minimum wages in Brazil in 1997-2010 amplified the impact of the change in labor market conditions during local expansions and diminished this impact during local recessions.</p><p>In the second essay, “A Framework for Estimating Persistence of Local Labor</p><p>Demand Shocks”, I propose a decomposition which allows me to study the persistence of local labor demand shocks. Persistence of labor demand shocks varies across industries, and the incidence of shocks in a region depends on the regional industrial composition. As a result, less diverse regions are more likely to experience deeper shocks, but not necessarily more long lasting shocks. Building on this idea, I propose a decomposition of local labor demand shocks into idiosyncratic location shocks and nationwide industry shocks and estimate the variance and the persistence of these shocks using the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) in 1990-2013.</p><p>In the third essay, “Conditional Choice Probability Estimation of Continuous- Time Job Search Models”, co-authored with Peter Arcidiacono and Arnaud Maurel, we propose a novel, computationally feasible method of estimating non-stationary job search models. Non-stationary job search models arise in many applications, where policy change can be anticipated by the workers. The most prominent example of such policy is the expiration of unemployment benefits. However, estimating these models still poses a considerable computational challenge, because of the need to solve a differential equation numerically at each step of the optimization routine. We overcome this challenge by adopting conditional choice probability methods, widely used in dynamic discrete choice literature, to job search models and show how the hazard rate out of unemployment and the distribution of the accepted wages, which can be estimated in many datasets, can be used to infer the value of unemployment. We demonstrate how to apply our method by analyzing the effect of the unemployment benefit expiration on duration of unemployment using the data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) in 1996-2007.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis describes the current situation on the Swedish labour market as many skilledmigrants have problems to find a relevant job. It explains the barriers for employment, aswell as the support mechanisms used to help the integration on the labour market. Particularfocus lies on the job search motivation, and how do the difficulties to find a job in arelevant professional field affect the job search motivation, and what are the reasons forthese effects. Thematic analysis is used to find recurring themes in the data collected from 5 semistructured interviews, 2 questionnaires and 1 additional interview from an employeeworking with the skilled migrants. Empirical findings show, that the respondents feel that local companies prefer localemployees, and that the migrants ascribe their difficulties to find a relevant job position todiscrimination, as it is common that they get rejected without being able to meet thecompany’s representatives in person. Countless rejected applications are causing feelings offrustration, hopelessness and the migrants’ doubt their ability to find a relevant job, whichleads to decreased job search motivation and underemployment. Furthermore, therespondents are rather motivated by extrinsic motivational factors than intrinsic motivators.However, the findings show that they believe that the job search becomes easier withaccumulated experience and that the difficulties with finding the right job makes therespondents more committed to the attained job. Finally, the authors formulate suggestionsfor further research. KEYWORDS: labour market integration, skilled migrants, job search motivation

This thesis is comprised of a series of published papers relating to the evaluation of active assistance measures for the unemployed in Australia. It offers both applied evaluations of active assistance measures as well as critical assessment of the evaluation approaches that have dominated the literature and policy formation in Australia. "Active" assistance for the unemployed is distinguished from "passive" assistance, such as income support.The motivation behind the work lies in the fact that a very large amount of public expenditure is directed to active assistance for the unemployed. Over $2 billion dollars was spent on labour market programs at the height of the Working Nation package in each of 1995-96 and 1996-97, and $1.5 billion was allocated to "labour market assistance to jobseekers and industry" in the most recent (2001-02) Commonwealth budget. Despite this considerable past and ongoing expenditure, the evaluation effort in Australia has been far short of international best practice. As a consequence, there is no convincing empirical evidence as to how effectively these public resources are being used, or of the relative merits of various options in the design of active interventions for the unemployed.Ultimately, the goal of the research is to improve supply-side policies designed to address unemployment. As stated, it aims to do this through original empirical evaluations of programs and through critical assessment of existing evaluations and institutional arrangements.

This dissertation aims to investigate alternative explanations for the adjustment of low-income inner-city minorities to residential locations. Particularly, this study searches for an answer to find the reason why low-income inner-city minorities do not move to residential locations with more job opportunities (suburbs). Much of the basis for the analysis in this dissertation derives from the irreversible investment theory under the assumption that moving can be considered as an irreversible investment. First, this study formulates a search model in which individuals simultaneously search for jobs and residential locations in two places: suburb and inner-city. Second, by employing The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Geocode files, this study attempts to address how social capital plays a role in households’ moving decisions under the irreversibility assumption. This study presents evidence that the social capital has a negative causal effect on moving decision, that is, the high levels of social capital reduce the probability of moving.

Geographic space is an important friction preventing the instantaneous matching of unemployed workers to job vacancies. Cities reduce spatial frictions by decreasing the average distance between potential match partners. Owing to these search efficiencies, theories of agglomeration predict that unemployed workers in larger labor markets find employment faster than observationally similar workers in smaller markets. Existing studies rely on cross-sectional variation in aggregate unemployment rates across spatially distinct labor markets to test for scale effects in job search. A major difficulty with these studies is that the unemployment rate is, at any given time, simultaneously the incidence and duration of unemployment. Therefore, conclusions about unemployment exits using the unemployment rate are confounded by transitions into unemployment. This dissertation examines the relationship between market scale unemployment duration for permanently laid off workers in the U.S. Using a large sample of individual unemployment spells in 259 MSAs, proportional hazard model estimates predict a negative relationship between market scale and the hazard of exiting unemployment. This effect is strengthened when space is explicitly controlled for and measured with greater precision. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that search efficiencies lead workers to increase their reservation wages. 2SLS estimates show that re-employment earnings for permanently laid off workers increase with market scale after controlling for endogenous search duration. These effects are robust to standard controls, as well as controls for local labor market conditions. These results challenge the view that search efficiencies lead to lower unemployment rates through faster job-finding rates.

Sambandet mellan personlighet och arbetssökande beteende har mestadels undersökts bland studenter tidigare. Denna studie undersökte om känslomässig instabilitet påverkade sättet att söka arbete hos 123 arbetssökande icke-studenter mellan 20-65 år. Enkäten som användes bestod av Personality Questionnaire (Bäccman &amp; Carlstedt, 2010), som mäter personligheten utifrån femfaktorsmodellen, samt Job Search Behavior (Blau, 1994), som mäter förberedande och aktiva arbetssökande beteenden. Det fanns ett samband mellan känslomässig instabilitet och båda arbetssökande beteenden. Känslomässig instabilitet kunde dock inte ensam predicera vilket arbetssökande beteende individer väljer, men tillsammans med ålder kunde känslomässig instabilitet predicera förberedande arbetssökande, och ålder kunde även ensamt predicera förberedande arbetssökande. Ålder kan vara en bättre prediktor än känslomässig instabilitet för arbetssökande beteende i en svensk population. / The relationship between personality and job search behavior has mostly been investigated among students before. This study investigated if neuroticism affected job search behaviors for 123 unemployed non-students between 20-65 years. The survey used consisted of Personality Questionnaire (Bäccman &amp; Carlstedt, 2010), measuring personality based on the five-factor model, and Job Search Behavior (Blau, 1994), measuring preparatory and active job search behaviors. There was a relationship between neuroticism and both job search behaviors. Neuroticism alone could, however, not predict which job search behavior individuals choose, but along with age neuroticism could predict preparatory job search, and age could even solely predict preparatory job search. Age may be a better predictor than neuroticism for job search behavior in a Swedish population.