We use novel high-frequency panel data on individuals'job applications from a job posting website to study how job seekers direct their applications over the course of job search. We …nd that at the beginning of search, applicants are sorted across vacancies by education. As search continues, education becomes a weaker predictor of which job a job seeker applies for, and an average job seeker applies for jobs that are a …rst-week choice of less educated job seekers. In particular, between week 2 and 26, the correlation between a job seeker's education and our measure of the type of job he applies for drops by 33 percent, with half of the drop happening by week 5. We interpret these …ndings to suggest that search is systematic, whereby a job seeker samples high wage opportunities (conditional on his belief about the probability of meeting the job requirements) …rst and lower wage opportunities later. The …ndings are consistent with the literature that documents declining reservation or desired wages, and provide evidence in favor of theories of job seekers'learning. (JEL Codes: E24, J64, J31, J24.)
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.