Current measures of labor demand have many issues. They tend to be expensive quarterly surveys that capture changes in labor demand with a considerable lag. Meanwhile, digital job ads are becoming more important for labor market research. The increasing use of online platforms for finding employees makes the platforms a more reliable representation of the labor market. By looking at the Swedish official job ads platform, Arbetsförmedlingen, we create an index that gauges labor demand in terms of how many jobs are advertised online. This index is in daily frequency and can act as a proxy for labor demand. To evaluate how well this index measures labor demand it is compared to official survey statistics on vacancies, published quarterly. In addition to the main analysis, the daily index is disaggregated by occupational group and region to display how it can be used for further studies of labor demand.
A project overview was presented at a workshop hosted by the Swedish Agency for Digital Government, video available here (YouTube).
Kevin Dee Boman - kevin.dee.boman@gmail.com
Project Link: https://github.com/kevindeeboman/masters_project