• Graduate program
    • Why Tinbergen Institute?
    • Program Structure
    • Courses
    • Course Registration
    • Facilities
    • Admissions
    • Recent PhD Placements
  • Research
  • News
  • Events
    • Summer School
      • Summer School
      • Behavioral Macro and Complexity
      • Climate Change
      • Networks in Micro- and Macroeconomics
      • Business Data Science Summer School Program
    • Events Calendar
    • Events Archive
    • Tinbergen Institute Lectures
    • Conference: Consumer Search and Markets
    • Annual Tinbergen Institute Conference
  • Summer School
  • Alumni
  • Times

Gautier, P. and Teulings, C. (2006). How large are search frictions? Journal of the European Economic Association, 4:1193--1225.


  • Journal
    Journal of the European Economic Association

This paper shows that we can normalize job and worker characteristics so that, without frictions, there exists a linear relationship between wages on the one hand and worker and job type indices on the other. However, for five European countries and the United States we find strong evidence for a systematic concave relationship. An assignment model with search frictions provides a parsimonious explanation for our findings. This model yields two restrictions on the coefficients that fit the data well. Allowing for unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error, we find that reservation wages are 25% lower than they would be in a frictionless world. Our results relate to the literature on industry wage differentials and on structural identification in hedonic models. © 2006 by the European Economic Association.