Abstract
Quantitative research in occupational mobility has typically focused on individual status attainment, examining the effect of background and individual characteristics on the attainment of status (or, infrequently, on mcomes). Yet the labor market involves a matching process in which the matches between persons and jobs are determined by the resources of the person, relative to those of other persons in the market, the resources of the job, relative to those of other jobs, the interest of the employer in the person's resources, and the mterest of the person in the job's resources A model is presented, assuming a perfect market of resource exchange, in which the value of the resources a person brings to the job is equal to the value of the job's resources. The model allows estimation of the value of each resource in the labor market. It is applied to data on a representative sample of the US labor force, allowing estimation of the value of various resources of persons and jobs in the US labor market in 1986.
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