Essays on public and private employment agencies in the United States, 1890--1940

My dissertation consists of four related studies on employment agencies and labor markets in the United States. The first two chapters examine the origin, rationale, development, and institutions of public and private agencies in the United States in the early 20th century. The third and fourth chapters use the data drawn from public employment offices to analyze the state of labor markets in the 1920s and during the Great Depression. The first chapter historically establishes the importance of public employment offices as a labor market intermediary in the U.S. The second chapter examines why public employment offices were introduced and how these organizations contributed to the development of labor markets by improving labor market efficiency. The third chapter explores how the US labor market functioned around the period of the Great Depression by estimating matching functions, a relationship between the flow of new hires and the stocks of job seekers and job vacancies with public employment office data. The last chapter revisits the debate on the decline in labor turnovers in 1920.