Jeremias Klaeui

I’m a post doc in Economics at CREST in Paris (ENSAE / IP) and at ETH Zurich (KOF Institute). My research makes use of data from online job search and recruitment to investigate how labour market imperfections shape job finding and wages. I obtained my PhD from the University of Lausanne, supervised by Rafael Lalive and Michael Siegenthaler. During my PhD, I visited the LSE on the invitation of Alan Manning.

News

Oct 2025: New report on AI and the Swiss labor market

Together with Michael Siegenthaler, we analyse early impacts of large language models (LLMs) on unemployment and job postings across occupations in Switzerland. → Full report

Research

Labor market imbalances, job search scopes and job finding

In progress; solo-authored

Presented at French Public Employment Services (Jul 2025), UC Berkeley Labor Lunch (Apr 2025), PSE Applied Economics Lunch (Feb 2025), EALE 2024 Bergen (Sep 2024), SKILS Ski and Labor Seminar Lenzerheide (Jan 2024), IZA Workshop: Matching Workers and Jobs Online (Sep 2023), LSE Labour WIP Seminar (Mar 2023)

This paper investigates how jobseekers adjust the breadth of their search across different segments of the labour market and how such adjustments affect employment outcomes. Imbalances often exist between jobseekers and vacancies in certain occupations or regions, potentially creating opportunities for jobseekers to adjust their search strategies and target segments where demand for them is high. I use a unique dataset that combines administrative unemployment records with detailed click data on job postings to measure search scope. I focus on two dimensions of breadth: the distance between a jobseeker’s residence and the posted job, and the local labour market tightness in the commuting zone–occupation segments. A key challenge is that jobseekers self-select into their search strategies. To address this, I exploit exogenous variation in the assignment of jobseekers to caseworkers, whose distinct tendencies influence jobseekers’ subsequent search patterns. I then link these caseworker-induced shifts in search scope to unemployment duration and job quality. My findings suggest that encouraging broader job search or targeting sectors with high labour demand surpluses has measurable effects on reemployment prospects and can alleviate mismatches between labour supply and demand. These results provide policy-relevant insights on how targeted counselling can shape jobseekers’ behaviour and improve labour market efficiency.

Job Search and Employer Market Power

In progress; with I. Bassier, A. Manning Presented at IZA Workshop: Matching Workers and Jobs Online (Sep 2025)

This paper provides a framework for thinking about how the job search of workers affects the market power of employers. We present a way of thinking about this which encapsulates popular existing models in which employer market power is based on either frictions in labor markets or imperfect substitutability among jobs. We show how this model can be used to compute measures of the extent of employer market power and relates them to popularly used measures of concentration ratios. We use data on the search behaviour of Swiss unemployed to investigate the number of employers being considered by job-seekers using 'clicks' on vacancies to define consideration sets.

Adapting to Scarcity: The Role of Firms in Occupational Transitions

In progress; with D. Kopp, R. Lalive, M. Siegenthaler Presented at ZEW Mannheim Research Seminar (Mar 2025), IZA Summer School in Labor Economics (June 2023)

This paper investigates how recruiters shape occupational mobility in the labor market. Prior research has emphasized workers’ decisions, largely overlooking the role of firms. We leverage unique click data from a recruitment platform. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that we can see the same applicant information that recruiters observe, making selection on observables plausible. We find that recruiters strongly favor candidates whose current occupation matches the advertised job. Nevertheless, non-matching candidates also have substantial hiring probabilities. Finally, we show that recruiters adjust their hiring patterns to occupational labor market tightness partially offseting occupational scarcity. Our estimates suggest that recruiter decisions account for roughly one third of occupational transitions.

Lowering sourcing costs for caseworkers

In progress; with R. Rathelot

Incidence of corporate taxation

In progress; with E. Baselgia, M. Brülhart, G. Rais, M. Siegenthaler

Policy and tools

Swiss Job Tracker

A real-time index of open vacancy postings in Switzerland
Github: R-code aggregating the scraped data from 70 job portals and 50K company webpages. I implemented an algorithm that deals with scraper issues and unstable job portals in real-time to obtain a clean index.

Policy reports & Media

Policy report: The effect of unemployment benefit sanctions on search effort and re-employment outcomes (w./ P. Arni, R. Lalive, B. Kaiser, M. Wolf) Summary article in Die Volkswirtschaft (DE/FR); Report
NZZaS: Studie zur zweiten Welle: 200 000 Selbständige fürchten um ihre Existenz.
Launch Swissjobtracker on Swissinfo (SRG SSR)

Teaching

During PhD: Econometrics at the master’s level (Course by Prof. M. Huber)

Other

Together with Pascal Josephy, I founded the web design and web development agency jkweb in 2011 (at the age of 17). The company by now employs over 30 programmers, designers and other specialists in Zurich and Basel. jkweb has recently acquired novu and is now called novu.