On the Identification of Models of Uncertainty, Learning, an d Human Capital Acquisition with Sorting
Abstract:
< p style="text-align: justify;">We consider the identification of matching m odels of the labor market in which firms and workers are ex ante heterogene ous in the presence of symmetric uncertainty and learning about worker abil ity and stochastic human capital acquisition by workers. We allow initial a bility and acquired human capital to be general across firms to varying deg rees. We establish conditions under which the primitives of these models ar e identified based on data on workers' jobs and wages. We then investigate the ability of existing measures of assortativeness of matching to detect t he degree of sorting implied by the class of models we consider. We p ropose a new measure of matching assortativeness that accounts for the evol ving uncertainty about workers' ability and workers' accumulati ng human capital. Based on this measure, we assess the extent to which chan ges in the patterns of labor market sorting, resulting from changes in the distribution of workers' ability, uncertainty about workers' ability, and the returns to human capital acquisition, have accounted for the incre ase in wage inequality documented the United States over the past 30 years or so. DTSTAMP:20260617T083649Z DTSTART:20240515T130000Z DTEND:20240515T140000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR