(joint with Patrick Arni)
The enforcement of job search requirements is increasingly employed to determine the level of search effort provided by unemployment insurance recipients. We evaluate the impacts of this policy on the rate of job finding. Previous research on job search monitoring has focused on the effects of an imposed benefit sanction. By estimating the impacts of requirement policies and their anticipated enforcement, we analyze how monitoring affects search outcomes before a sanction event occurs. New Swiss administrative data sources allow us to match individual-level information on requirement setting, compliance behavior and enforcement policies. We estimate a multivariate duration model which we complement with quasi-experimental variation in our parameters of interest. Our preliminary results indicate that additional applications generated by a high-requirement policy do not directly translate into job search success. Search requirements rather seem to influence unemployment exit rates through changes in non-compliance behavior and sanction anticipation.