Does Digitization Impact Job Matching Efficiency? A Study of Swedish Labor Market Regions

Sammanfattning: The use of digital tools in recruiting has increased over the last 20 years and is likely to have improved the transparency and shortened the duration of job search. Therefore, I asses empirically whether increased digitization in firms has had a positive impact on the efficiency of job matching. I estimate the correlation between firm digitization and matching efficiency within Swedish labor market regions using panel data between the years 1998 and 2016. Firm digitization is approximated by the number of individuals who work in a labor market region and possess formal education in the field of information technology. My results are mixed, while I do find a significant correlation in some regressions, robustness tests do not confirm the effect. With the inclusion of year fixed effects the estimated correlation is significantly reduced. Therefore, this study can not confirm that digitization improves job matching efficiency.