comprehensive.
Comprehensive coverage is not necessary as long as the included studies are
representative of the population.
Common desiderata in literature retrieval are a high recall
and a high precision.
Recall is defined as the ratio of relevant documents retrieved to those in
a collection that should be retrieved.
Precision is defined as the ratio of documents retrieved
and judged relevant to all those actually retrieved.
Unfortunately, precision and recall tend to
vary inversely (White 1994).
Most researchers favor high precision, whereas researchers
dealing with research synthesis typically desire a high recall.
The collection procedure used in this study focuses on high recall.
It is based on the
traditional 'footnote chasing' (or rather 'reference chasing') and consultation of scholars.
In
addition, we extensively used more modern methods of literature retrieval, such as browsing
Internet databases.
In particular, we searched EconLit
6
and Sociological Abstracts
7
in order
to obtain as many published articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations as possible up
until 1999.
In addition, we took special care to include unpublished studies, up until 1999,
through a search in NetEc, RepEc, and websites of renowned universities and research
institutes (for instance, CEPR, NBER, etc.).
8
Table 1 presents an overview of 38 empirical matching function studies found in these
sources.
From the studies in Table 1 we selectively include only those labor market matching
studies that provide a test on whether the returns to scale estimate (usually defined as
b
a
ˆ
ˆ
in a Cobb-Douglas production function) is significantly different from 1.
If the
6
EconLit (see http://www.econlit.org/) is a comprehensive, indexed bibliography with selected abstracts of the
world's economic literature, produced by the American Economic Association.
It includes coverage of over 400
major journals as well as articles in collective volumes (essays, proceedings, etc.), books, book reviews,
dissertations, and working papers licensed from the Cambridge University Press Abstracts of Working Papers in
Economics.
7
Sociological Abstracts (see http://www.csa.com/) provides access to the world's literature in sociology and
related disciplines, both theoretical and applied.
The database includes abstracts of journal articles selected
from over 2500 journals, abstracts of conference papers presented at various sociological association meetings,
relevant dissertation listings from Dissertations Abstracts International, enhanced bibliographic citations of book
reviews, and abstracts of selected sociology books.
8
NetEc includes BibEc, WoPEc, and WebEc (see http:/netec.wustl.edu). For RepEc see http://www.repec.org.
IVEEA
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