ABSTRACT
Burgess (1999) informs us that ‘in the UK, some 8 million new hires are completed each year, relative to a workforce of around 25 million’ (p. 1). This chapter contains two distinct but linked ideas. The first is the microeconomic analysis of the search for jobs. We will focus on the job search activity of unemployed workers. The second, which arose from search models, is the macroeconomic concept of the job matching function. This chapter will concentrate on a particular example of the matching function that sets out a relationship between unemployment and vacancies and generates a U-V or ‘Beveridge’ curve.
