Measuring Matching Efficiency Using the Public Employment Service Agency in Japan

This paper decomposes the probability of a match being formed between a job seeker and a firm into two components. In the first matching process, a job seeker applies for a job and manages to obtain an interview with a firm advertising a job vacancy at the employment service office, and in the second process, upon contact, the job seeker and the firm agree to form a match. This allows us to explore in which process matching efficiency has improved over the sample period.