Job Heterogeneity and Coordination Frictions

We develop a new directed search model of a frictional labor market with a continuum of heterogenous workers and firms. We estimate two versions of the model - auction and price posting - using Danish data on wages and productivities. Assuming heterogenous workers with no comparative advantage, we find that each model gives a reasonable approximation of the statistical moments of both the wage and productivity distribution. A sensitivity analysis then draws out further implications of the theory. We explain how the feasible matchings between workers and firms changes as the worker moves up the job ladder, how the identification of assortative matching is fundamentally different in directed and undirected search models, how our theory accounts for business cycle facts related to inter-temporal changes in job offer distributions, and how our model could also be used to identify the contributions of specific versus general human capital.