We construct new monthly city-level and national measures of firm search for workers from 1900 to 1938, drawing on approximately 5 million scanned help-wanted advertisements from five U.S. newspapers, with breakdowns by gender. We document four main findings: (1) firm search effort is procyclical, declining sharply at the onset of recessions; (2) posting costs affect advertising behavior, but the effect is modest, with an elasticity of -0.0$; (3) the U.S. Beveridge curve has been stable for the past 125 years, with matching elasticities of 0.57 pre-WWII and 0.55 post-WWII; and (4) help-wanted advertisements for women are more responsive than those for men to both posting costs and the business cycle.
Suggested citation:
Huixin Bi, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Nora Traum, and Greg Woodward. 2026. “Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Help-Wanted Advertisements.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2025-13. https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2025-13