On the Importance of Social Status for Occupational Sorting
I examine how social status affects occupational sorting in a model with two occupations, academia and finance. Workers care about wages and social status, which has two components: occupational prestige (the occupation’s rank among other occupations) and local status (the worker’s within-occupation rank). The main insight is that the two components of social status act as complements: If the local status component plays an important role in academia, then academia attracts many high-skilled workers, which increases academia’s prestige and compensates the low-ranked academics for their meager local status. Consequently, social status can influence occupational sorting profoundly if workers value both components of status.

Link to paper: www.pawelgola.com/StatusLabourMarketsGola

Please sign up for meetings here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WTp83AxJaVGv6sMlwBer43q68i43dAe9BSeyb26ypa4/edit#gid=0
Date: 21 May 2021, 14:15 (Friday, 4th week, Trinity 2021)
Venue: Held on Zoom
Speaker: Pawel Gola (BI Norwegian Business School)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Nuffield Economic Theory Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Melis Clark