The Assignment of Workers to Jobs in an Economy with Coordination Frictions.

This paper studies the assignment of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous jobs. Owing to the anonymity of a large labor market, workers use mixed strategies when applying for jobs. This randomness generates coordination frictions. Two workers may apply for a particular job, whereas an identical jo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Political Economy Vol. 113; no. 5; pp. 996 - 1026
Main Author: Shimer, Robert
Format: Article
Published: University of Chicago Press October 2005
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:This paper studies the assignment of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous jobs. Owing to the anonymity of a large labor market, workers use mixed strategies when applying for jobs. This randomness generates coordination frictions. Two workers may apply for a particular job, whereas an identical job gets no applications. The model generates assortative matching, with a positive but imperfect correlation between matched workers' and firms' types. It predicts that a worker's wage is increasing in her job's productivity and a firm's profit is increasing in its employees' productivity. The model also yields a version of the welfare theorems. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.