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Title: Job Search and Impatience
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Dellavigna, Stefano
Paserman, Marco Daniele
Job Search and Impatience
NBER Working Paper No. 10837, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2004.
Also: http://www.nber.org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/papers/w10837.pdf
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Exits; Job Search; Unemployment; Unemployment Duration; Wages, Reservation

How does impatience affect job search? More impatient workers search less intensively and set a lower reservation wage. The effect on the exit rate from unemployment is unclear. In this paper we show that, if agents have exponential time preferences, the reservation wage effect dominates for sufficiently patient individuals, so increases in impatience lead to higher exit rates. The opposite is true for agents with hyperbolic time preferences: more impatient workers search less and exit unemployment later. Using two large longitudinal data sets, we find that various measures of impatience are negatively correlated with search effort and the exit rate from unemployment, and are orthogonal to reservation wages. Overall, impatience has a large effect on job search outcomes in the direction predicted by the hyperbolic discounting model.
Bibliography Citation
Dellavigna, Stefano and Marco Daniele Paserman. "Job Search and Impatience." NBER Working Paper No. 10837, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2004.