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Some economists have argued that assortative mating between men and women has increased over the last several decades. Sociologists have argued that educational homogamy has increased. The two are conceptually distinct but often confused. We clarify the relation between the two and, using both the Current Population Surveys and the decennial Censuses/American Community Survey, show that neither conclusion is correct. Both are sensitive to how educational categories are chosen. The former is based on the use of inappropriate statistical techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the matching relationship between factor endowment and industrial structure, and its impact on economic growth.

The assortative matching method is developed to quantitatively measure the matching between factor endowment and industrial structure. A series of empirical tests are then carried out to evaluate the impact on the economic development of the matching.

1) The matching between factor endowment and industrial structure has a significantly positive impact on economic growth. (2) Economic growth reaches its maximum when the gap between the two sectors narrows to zero. (3) This effect is particularly significant for countries with higher GDP per capita and GNI per capita. (4) The results remain robust after employing a series of tests.

Aggressive industrial policies are not desirable. The optimal industrial structure is the one that complied with the comparative advantage of the given factor endowment in the economy.

So far, there has been a significant lack of an applicable quantitative indicator for measuring the matching between factor endowment and industrial structure, which is essential for conducting empirical tests and providing evidence for related economic theories.

This article estimates the loan spread equation taking into account the endogenous matching between banks and firms in the loan market. To overcome the endogeneity problem, I supplement the loan spread equation with a two-sided matching model and estimate them jointly. Bayesian inference is feasible using a Gibbs sampling algorithm that performs Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations. I find that medium-sized banks and firms tend to be the most attractive partners, and that liquidity is also a consideration in choosing partners. Furthermore, banks with higher monitoring ability charge higher spreads, and firms that are more leveraged or less liquid are charged higher spreads.

Income inequality rose in Germany since the 1970s. To quantify the impact of different socio-economic trends on inequality, the author constructs counterfactual distributions of net household income with rich German data from the Microcensus in 1976 and 2011. The procedure allows to study the effect of marital sorting in education and includes indirect effects such as the influence of education on employment. When comparing the income distribution in West Germany for 1976 and 2011, the author finds that the prevalence of singlehood accounts to a large extent for the observed increase in inequality. The inequality increase is also associated with a change of employment among males and single females. When comparing West and East Germany in 2011, the author finds that the stronger labour market attachment of East German married females combined with the high East German unemployment produces even more income inequality than the West German employment structure. Moreover, the smaller household size boosts inequality in East Germany, whereas education works against it. In both comparisons, the author finds no significant impact of positive assortative mating in education or ageing.

Applied research shows higher wages are associated with lower mobility at the establishment level. A usual interpretation is that high pay decreases labour turnover. The purpose of this paper is to test if such relationship holds for every type of worker in every type of firm.

The analysis is based on a linked employer-employee panel dataset covering the French private sector from 2002 to 2005. The authors compute establishment wage effects and use them as explanatory variables in labour mobility equations (for churning rate and quit rate). Using spline regression models enables to investigate for potential non-linearities.

The authors show that the relationship between churning rate and wage is non-linear and has the shape of an inverted J: the relation is negative and intense for establishments with low wage effect, weaker for average paying establishments and even becomes positive for very high-paying ones. This is true whatever the skill group of workers. It is also true for large establishments while the relationship is still negative but linear for small ones. The relationship between wages and quit rates has a strikingly similar pattern. This suggests that the link between churning and establishment wage effect is strongly related to quit decisions.

A possible interpretation of our results is that paying higher wages may be an effective stabilizing tool especially for employers in small establishments and when starting wages are relatively low.

The paper is the first to decompose the relationship between wage and mobility. It shows the relationship differs across establishment size and is not linear. The paper also shows quits play a role in this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to show that for some key topics on labour economics such as the effect of seniority and job mobility in wages, it is important to explicitly consider firm fixed effects. The author also wants to test whether the importance of firm in explaining wage dispersion is higher or lower in Spain than in other European countries.

The author estimates an individual wage equation where firm and workers effects are considered and the estimation process control for censored wages. This exercise is performed for the Spanish economy over the course of a whole business cycle, i.e., 2000-2015.

The author demonstrates that Spanish firms contribute to explain around 27 per cent of the individual wage heterogeneity but more importantly around 74 per cent of inter-industry wage differentials. In both cases, this contribution is mainly related to large dispersion in firm’s wage policies. The process of positive sorting of workers across firms or industries does not play an important role. Interestingly, the importance of firm’s wage policies in explaining individual wage dispersion has increased over the current Big Recession.

The results confirm that firms set wages and, henceforth, are partially responsible for individual wage heterogeneity but more importantly for inter-industrial wage dispersion.

The exercise is performed under optimal conditions because the author uses a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set, observed wages are at a monthly frequency, and implements an estimation method suitable for censored models with two high-dimensional fixed effects. This is the first study that looks deeply into the role of firms in explaining wage heterogeneity at the individual and industry level in Spain and along the current Big Recession.

The reasons for writing the paper are flexibility of information under multi‐agent approach.

The main method used for the research is preferences in environment and matching of information.

The benefits of hierarchy flow from the fact that it attenuates opportunism and attenuates the problem stemming from bounded rationality. The preference of an agent over sets of possible future choices can be represented using subjective states. This is sufficient to give a representation in which the agent has a coherent subjective state space, and shows that the size of the subjective state space depends on the individual circumstances.

The original value of the paper is a measure of the agent's uncertainty about future contingents. Changes in the surplus yield valuable information about the comparative static of matching patterns across environments in equilibrium.