Essays on labor market matching, labor mobility and educational mismatch

This dissertation includes three essays on labor market matching, labor mobility and educational mismatch.;Essay one is a literature survey on labor market matching. It is the first attempt in the literature to link various aspects of labor market matching. After an overview of the structural equilibrium search models, I elaborate on the micro-foundations of the matching function, a major modeling tool to capture the influence of frictions on equilibrium outcomes. Issues such as turnover theory, mismatch and dynamic income processes are also examined in this survey..;Essay two considers the effect of voluntary job mobility on worker well-being. Using data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 (NLSY79), I construct measures of worker well-being that take into account various ingredients likely to factor into a worker's utility at workplace. I adopt a difference-in-differences matching strategy to uncover the otherwise unobservable potential outcomes of not changing jobs and identify the effect of voluntary labor mobility on worker well-being. The result shows that voluntary turnover increases the well-being at workplace for movers who are in the early stage of their career and conduct complex job changes involving different types of job. However, the positive effect of job mobility is insignificant and much smaller for movers taking simple job changes. This is in contrast with the fact that complex job movers actually experienced insignificant wage gains from the mobility. This result highlights the role of non-pecuniary job rewards in triggering voluntary turnover.;Essay three considers the wage effects of educational mismatch using data from the 2003 wave of National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG 2003). I find that the average wage loss associated with educational mismatch is significant and persistent. Graduates who are mismatched for involuntary reasons incur greater wage penalty compared to those for voluntary reasons. In addition, graduates with advanced degree suffer more from mismatch relative to those with only bachelor's degree. Lastly, there are considerable amounts of variations in the distributional impacts. The wage penalty is quite large at lower quantiles and decrease sharply towards higher quantiles.