مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد امنیت شغلی، ثبات و بهره روی شغلی – وایلی 2017

Since the work of Kelso and Crawford (1982) the two-sided many-to-one matching model has emerged as the prominent tool to analyze labor markets whenever firms and workers are heterogeneous. The notion of stability, initially due to Gale and Shapley (1962), is the standard solution concept for matching models in general and for labor markets in particular. A stable outcome is an allocation of workers to firms (of which one firm is the outside option of unemployment) and a salary vector for the workers such that no combination of a single firm and a set of workers can improve their position while disregarding the others (there is no “blocking coalition”). Underlying the logic of this solution concept is the notion of a free, unregulated, competitive market, where any coalition can withdraw from the market if the market does not provide them with a desired outcome. A fundamental question about stability, as with any game-theoretic (or economic) solution concept, is its existence. An elegant solution concept whose existence cannot be guaranteed in settings of economic interest falls short of being fully satisfactory. In their original paper, Kelso and Crawford prove existence, as well as efficiency, under the assumption that firms’ preferences over sets of workers exhibit “gross substitutability” (on which we elaborate in the sequel). Much of the followup literature follows in their footsteps and assumes gross-substitutes production functions. In fact, Gul and Stacchetti (1999) have shown that the existence of stable outcomes may not be guaranteed beyond gross-substitutes production functions and the theory then becomes mute for such markets. To remedy this, we consider the following question: Can one weaken the requirements underlying the notion of stability, in some natural way, to obtain existence for a larger class of markets? In reality many labor markets are regulated and in particular much of the regulation provides various degrees of job security to workers.1 The theoretical literature on matching seems to be mute about the possibility and implications of job security, and the ongoing public debate of such regulation has not been part of the matching literature so far. Job security regulation, within the context of a matching model, should be seen as a hurdle to the formation of blocking coalitions. Under such regulation, one should expect stability to hold for a larger class of production functions. This is exactly the line of thought we pursue. Thus, partly to remedy the existence problem of stable outcomes and partly motivated by observations about real labor markets, the present paper studies matching markets that enforce job security. Our contribution is conceptual as well as technical. Conceptually, we introduce a new solution concept for the many-to-one matching model: JS (job security) stability. We do so by revising the notion of stability so that it accounts for a regulated labor market. In particular we would like to model a regulated market where firms cannot unilaterally fire employees, or where such costs of firing are prohibitively high. In such labor markets, for a firm to be part of a blocking coalition, it must account for its current employees and ensure their utility is not compromised. More simply, such a firm must retain its workers at their current salary level.