LA FUNCIÓN DE CONTRATACIÓN: TEORÍA Y EVIDENCIA EMPÍRICA PARA LA CIUDAD DE CALI 1993-2001

Abstract

Recent national policies in Colombia are pointing to the reduction of job information centers in an effort to reduce public deficit, leaving job seekers without opportunities to find vacancies available in the local labor market. Using a dataset from the Center for Labor Information from Sena, we built a series of labor market indicators from 1993 to 2001 for the city of Cali, Colombia, to evaluate the significance of job seeker-vacancy matching in the job allocation. Within a macroeconomic framework, we specify and estimate a hiring equation as a function of unemployed and job openings. To this end, we first checked that time series for hiring, unemployed and vacancies satisfy the stationarity assumption, finding that they do not exhibit unit roots, and thus we proceed to estimate an OLS regression. The estimation results reveal that, even under disequilibrium in hiring time series, the matching between unfilled vacancies and job seekers has a significant influence on the time series fluctuation.