Adam Smith Business School

Professor Andreas I. Mueller, University of Zurich

"The Ins and Outs of Vacancies"
Thursday, 30 April 2026. 15:00
Room 386AB ASBS

Abstract

This paper uses large-scale high-frequency data on vacancy flows and matched employer-employee data from Austria to document the cyclicality of vacancy flows and their contribution to variation in the vacancy stock. We document four key facts: (1) Vacancy inflows explain at least one-third of the cyclical variation in the vacancy stock, whereas the remainder is explained by vacancy fillings; (2) vacancy lapses, while accounting for about 20% of vacancy outflows, are acyclical and do not contribute to variation in the stock; (3) replacement vacancies, i.e. vacancies posted following a quit of a worker to another firm, are a key driver of vacancy inflows over the business cycle; and (4) the composition of vacancy inflows varies little over the business cycle and cannot account for the cyclical variation in vacancy filling. We set up a search-and-matching model with fixed costs of vacancy posting and on-the-job search, and calibrate it to match the averages of vacancy flows. The calibrated model highlights the crucial role of on-the-job search – particularly replacement hires – in explaining the observed importance of vacancy inflows for cyclical fluctuations in the vacancy rate.

Bio

Andreas I. Mueller holds the Professorship for Macroeconomics and Labor Markets at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich and is an Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center for Economics in Society. Prior to joining the University of Zurich, he was an Associate Professor at UT Austin and Columbia Business School. Mueller received his doctorate from the IIES, Stockholm University, and was awarded the Arnbergska Prize for his dissertation work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research spans a broad spectrum of issues in macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics and has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies and covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. Professor Mueller is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and the Rockwool Foundation Berlin, an Associate Editor at the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Monetary Economics, and a Member of Editorial Board the Review of Economic Studies.

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First published: 10 February 2026