The Job Ads Database (JADB) Prototype: Building a New Resource for Historical Labour Market Research

This paper introduces a novel dataset that serves as a prototype of what we call the ‘Job Ads Database’ (JADB). The underlying job advertisements are gathered from the Swedish digitalized newspaper corpus hosted by and made accessible through the Swedish National Library (Kungliga Biblioteket). JADB enables studying how the frequency and content of job advertisements change over time and sheds new light on the role of newspapers in recruitment, both relative to earlier practices and to public employment offices. We compare JADB data with official employment statistics of notified vacancies and applications from the Swedish Public Employment Administration (SPEA).