Abstract
Based on the counting of Help-wanted advertisements in print newspapers, we build national vacancy indexes and vacancy rates for Colombia for the period 1976–2012. The result is the first dataset capturing the evolution of vacancies for Colombia and the first one covering such a long period for any developing country. We publish the series in the Additional file 1; an online version is also available at http://economia.uniandes.edu.co/vacantescolombia.We explain how we built the series and tackle the most important questions concerning some issues about the representativeness of the resulting vacancy rate. These series will allow tackling many questions related to the functioning of the labor markets in emerging economies, where such datasets were not available.We relate the vacancy rate with the Colombian business cycle and estimate a Beveridge curve. We find that the vacancy rate is procyclical while the latter relationship presents the expected downward slope between vacancies and unemployment with a structural change—an outward shift—around 1986.JEL codesE24, E32, J63, J64
Highlights
In Álvarez and Hofstetter (2012, 2013), AH hereafter we built a 50 year-long monthly vacancies’ series for the city of Bogota based on the counting of Help-wanted (HW) advertisements in the main newspaper in town, El Tiempo
We have collected data on help wanted advertisements published in the print versions of the main newspapers in seven cities in Colombia, at a monthly frequency over the period 1976 to 2012
In this paper, using this dataset which we describe carefully, we propose a national help wanted index and a national vacancy rate
Summary
1. Introduction In Álvarez and Hofstetter (2012, 2013), AH hereafter we built a 50 year-long monthly vacancies’ series for the city of Bogota based on the counting of Help-wanted (HW) advertisements in the main newspaper in town, El Tiempo. We discuss the correspondence of the vacancy rate to the business cycle in Colombia and report Beveridge curves. The same is true for our paper: our vacancy rates obtained with HW ads help estimating the dynamics of unmet labor demand, not its absolute level.
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