Faster Filling, Better Fit?

The causal question can now be made concrete: when the applicant supply facing an Austrian vacancy rises because of a nearby mass-layoff shock, does the vacancy close sooner, and does the worker who fills it stay longer? Those are different transitions in the same hiring process. This chapter interprets the paper’s duration estimates in real units and then follows the hire beyond the start date. The goal is to judge what the evidence supports about matching without turning a longer employment spell into proof of productivity or satisfaction.

The first gain appears when search would otherwise drag

The study’s matched vacancies receive an average of 5.63 applications during the first week, with a standard deviation of 6.87. The average vacancy remains open for 51.01 days. These figures establish the scale of the result: the typical vacancy is not filled immediately, and the difference between a thin and a relatively deep early pool can amount to several applications rather than one dramatic flood of candidates.

The IV estimate says that one additional first-week observed application reduces log vacancy duration by about 0.90%. The estimate is expressed in percentage terms because the outcome is the logarithm of duration, but its practical meaning is easier to see when scaled to the observed variation. A one-standard-deviation increase—about 6.9 applications—is associated with a 6.1% shorter vacancy duration. Against a 51-day average, that is roughly three days.

Three days may sound modest beside a long recruitment cycle, but it is not the same as saying that every employer can buy three days by collecting seven more résumés. The estimate is a local causal effect for the vacancies and marginal applicants moved by the mass-layoff instrument. It describes how a change in the pool is related to the vacancy’s duration under the study’s conditions. It does not establish a fixed production function for applications across recruitment channels.

The timing of the result makes the mechanism more revealing. The effect is concentrated in weeks five through eight after posting, when about half of the vacancies still need to be filled. During that period, one additional application lowers the probability that a vacancy remains active by roughly one percentage point. The effect is therefore not presented as an immediate acceleration from the first day. It appears most clearly when a vacancy has already stayed open long enough for scarcity to become binding.

That pattern fits the search model. Early in a vacancy’s life, an employer may still expect suitable candidates to arrive and may not have exhausted its obvious options. The marginal value of one more person in the pool is limited if the firm is not yet constrained. Later, after several weeks of searching, an additional candidate can change the choice between continued waiting and accepting a credible fit. The same application count can therefore have a different practical value depending on where the vacancy is in its search.

The scale also needs to be read correctly. A log-duration coefficient is a proportional estimate, not a claim that one application removes a fixed number of days from every vacancy.