Volume 21, Number 1 (Winter) 1986
St. Louis, Robert D., Paul L. Burgess, and Jerry L. Kingston. 1986. "Reported vs. Actual Job Search by Unemployment Insurance Claimants." Journal of Human Resources 21(1):92-117.
This study compares self-reported job search contacts of unemployment insurance recipients with independently verified job-search contacts. For the total sample, reported contacts averaged 2.61 per week compared with actual contacts of only 1.78 per week; nearly one-fifth of the sample made no job contacts for the single weeks analyzed. The separate equations estimated for reported and actual job contacts suggest that systematic misreporting may distort the conclusions-particularly for the impact of unemployment insurance benefits on search intensity-that would result from analyzing reported (rather than actual) contacts. Some implications of the findings for reported unemployment rates also are explored.
Burgess and Kingston are professors of economics and St. Louis is an associate professor of decision and information systems at Arizona State University. Burgess and Kingston gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Chamber Foundation (NCF); this paper is part of a larger study being conducted by Burgess and Kingston for the NCF. The data utilized for this article were developed by the authors under contract with the Unemployment Insurance Service of the US Department of Labor. and the authors thank this agency and the five state UI agencies involved for their support in developing the data set. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the official positions or policies of either the National Chamber Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor or the state UI agencies that participated in the study. The paper was substantially improved by suggestions made on earlier versions by Arthur Blakemore, Stuart Low, and two anonymous referees. The authors are, of course, responsible for any remaining errors.
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