This paper studies the role of employer behavior in generating “negative duration dependence”
–the adverse e¤ect of a longer unemployment spell – by sending …ctitious resumes to real job
postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for
an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker’s unemployment spell, with the
majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months. We explore how this effect
varies with local labor market conditions, and find that duration dependence is stronger when
the labor market is tighter. We develop a theoretical framework that shows how the sign of this
interaction effect can be used to discern among leading models of duration dependence based
on employer screening, employer ranking, and human capital depreciation. Our results suggest
that employer screening plays an important role in generating duration dependence; employers
use the unemployment spell length as a signal of unobserved productivity and recognize that this
signal is less informative in weak labor markets.