Job Matching, Wage Dispersion, and Unemployment

Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides are the recipients (with Peter Diamond) of the Nobel memorial Prize in Economics 2010. They have made path-breaking contributions to the analysis of markets with search and matching frictions, which account for much of the success of job search theory and the flows approach in becoming a leading tool for microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis of labor markets. Both scientists have gained groundbreaking insights through individual as well as joint research. Consequently, this volume not only features several papers which helped shape the equilibrium search model, including some early contributions which have initiated the research on what is known today as the search and matching model of the labor market, but it also presents a joint paper by the IZA Prize Laureates, which is a complete statement of the equilibrium search and matching model with endogenous job creation and job destruction. As part of the IZA Prize Series, the book presents a selection of their most important work which has highly enriched research on unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon, on labor market dynamics, and on cyclical adjustment.

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Dale T. Mortensen is the Niels Bohr Visiting Professor of Economics at Aarhus University, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an IZA Research Fellow. He received his BA in Economics from Willamette University in 1961 and his PhD in Economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967. Mortensen is a fellow of Econometrica Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, and the European Economic Association. He was awarded the Society of Labor Economics Mincer Prize in 2007 and elected an American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow in 2008. Among his publications are over fifty scientific articles and his book Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar Workers Paid Differently?

Christopher A. Pissarides holds the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics. He specialises in the economics of unemployment, labor market theory and policy, and economic growth and structural change. Pissarides has published extensively in professional journals and his book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory is a standard reference in the field. He is President Elect 2010 of the European Economic Association, Fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists. His editorial activities include the chair of the Economica board, and membership of the editorial board of the AEJ: Macroeconomics and other journals. He is research fellow of IZA, the Centre of Economic Performance at LSE, and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR London).