Essays on match quality and educational choice

In this dissertation, I examine the role of match quality and educational choice. Chapter 1 examines how match quality behaves over the short run and calibrates an economic model to national, business cycle data. Chapter 2 turns to the microeconomics of match quality and examine the role of individual match quality in explaining variations in individual earnings Chapter 3 examines how academic achievement influences individual earnings for different college majors.;Chapter 1 examines the effect of skill mismatches on key labor market variables. I extend the random matching model of Albrecht and Vroman [2002] to allow for unskilled workers to accept offers of complex jobs, a persistent feature of the data. I calibrate the parameters of the model, and compare the business cycle predictions across a number of specifications. Results show that the model predicts well key series such as the unemployment rate, the job finding rate, and the wages for all match types; incorporating both sources of variation drastically improves the performance of the model.;Chapter 2 combines a widely held view of how earnings are related to education and job tenure with the notion that earnings are associated with the quality of an employer-employee job match. Better-matched individuals should be more productive and, as a result, have higher earnings. We use the Alumni Outcomes Survey to estimate the importance of job congruence on earnings after controlling both for job tenure and for academic achievement. Results indicate that job congruence is positively correlated with earnings, and these effects differ significantly across gender.;Chapter 3 examines the way the choice of college major influences the relation between academic achievement and earnings. The sample is divided into "science" and "non-science" majors and the wage differential between these two majors is examined. An econometric model that accounts for the selection into college major is estimated to generate predictions on earnings for each major across the support of academic achievement. The results indicate that while the relation between achievement and the college major earnings differential is non-monotonic for women, it is strictly declining for men.