The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a nifty new piece of research suggesting that the expiration of Emergency Unemployment Compensation — the federal extended unemployment insurance benefits that allowed jobless individuals to collect up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits — contributed to the rapid creation of job openings in early 2014:
increases in UI generosity put upward pressure on wages since it becomes more expensive to lure people into work. As a consequence, firms anticipate lower profits and cut back job creation, which lowers the job finding rate and increases the unemployment rate.