Comparing time series characteristics of official and web job vacancy data

This paper studies the relationship between a job vacancy population obtained from an international project based on web scraping of online job vacancies and job vacancies derived by the Eurostat job vacancy rate referred to Italian national statistics survey. We compare the time series properties of both time series between 2013 and 2018, globally and in each specific sector of economic activity. Using time series decomposition and cointegration analyses, we find that, apart from some specific sector, the web and national statistics office vacancies data present similar time series properties, suggesting that both time series represent the same underlying phenomenon, namely the real number of new vacancies in the Italian economy. The study confirms promising frontiers to measure in real time aggregate demand in the labour market based on web data.