A survey and essay on labor market screening

This thesis consists of two chapters. The first chapter surveys the theory of labor market screening. The review has three aims: to summarize and motivate labor screening models, to situate these models within the related literature, and to analyze the individual modeling components. The second chapter is an essay investigating screening labor markets with scaling effects. With M firms and N agents playing a screening game, firms post wage offers to attract applicants. As the number of firms competing for applicants increase, equilibrium wage decreases. Also as the number of firms increase, per firm profit increases. These results are applicable when the market signal is viable: there are at least a critical number of firms in the signaling market.