No. A common misunderstanding is that our analysis treats JOLTS job openings as a measure of unmet labor demand.[^1] This is not the case. Nowhere in the analysis do we interpret vacancies that way. Beveridge did interpret job vacancies as unmet labor demand and accordingly defined full employment as the point where job vacancies exceed job seekers. But our approach is different: we interpret vacancies as an indirect measure of the labor devoted to recruiting. In the United States, it takes roughly one recruiter to handle one vacancy, so the number of vacancies tracks the amount of labor devoted to recruiting. This empirical regularity is what we use in deriving the FERU.
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