Excess Worker Reallocation

Abstract

Workers face a trade-off between macroeconomic and individual incentives to work in different occupations/industries; namely, between search frictions and personal comparative advantages. Workers endowed with heterogeneous multi-dimensional skills search for jobs that require different skill combinations. In equilibrium, specialized individuals contact few, selected types of vacancies, where they are likely to be hired; those with weak comparative advantages are seldom chosen among competing applicants, thus seek any job type. In a tight labour market, comparative advantages dominate waiting costs: offsetting labour mobility across industries/occupations—Excess Worker Reallocation—is lower and matches are more successful, consistently with direct and indirect evidence.