Becker meets Ricardo: Multisector matching with social and cognitive skills

Arbeitspapier

This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and coordination between team members, and individuals with more social skills communicate and coordinate at lower resource cost. The theory delivers full task specialization in the labor and education markets, but incomplete specialization in marriage. It also captures well-known matching patterns in each of these sectors, including the commonly observed many-to-one matches in firms and schools. Equilibrium is equivalent to the solution of a utilitarian social planner solving a linear programming problem.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 6533

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity ; Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
• Subject: social skill ; cognitive skill ; matching ; sorting ; education ; labor ; marriage ; social welfare ; linear programming ; Kognition ; Matching ; Schule ; Arbeitsgruppe ; Ehe ; Soziale Wohlfahrtsfunktion ; Mathematische Optimierung ; Theorie

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): McCann, Robert J. ; Shi, Xianwen ; Siow, Aloysius ; Wolthoff, Ronald P.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2012

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/58593
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2012081612244
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET