Relationship between job opportunities and economic environments measured from data in internet job searching sites

Abstract

This study investigates the number of job opportunities collected from a Japanese job searching site (“fromA navi”) and an inter- national job searching site (“Indeed”). We confirm that a relationship between the number of job opportunities and socioeconomic quantities (the population, the numbers of firms and workers) in each 1-km grid square in Japan. The number of workers is the best explanatory variable to explain the number of job opportunities in Japan. The regression coefficients can be used as an indicator to grasp Japanese macroeconomic conditions. From a global point of view, we analyse the number of job opportunities in about 16, 000 cities all over the world. We confirm the daily number of job opportunities in each city varies in time and show some asso- ciations with macroeconomic indicators. We compute a relationship between means of the daily number of job opportunities and their standard deviations and confirm that it follows a scaling relationship with power law exponent α = 1. A possible model based on Poisson processes with intensity of which varies in time on the basis of a common noise is proposed to explain the phenomenon empirically observed.