The pond dilemma with heterogeneous relative concerns

Paweł Gola

Journal of Public Economics, 2025, vol. 249, issue C

Abstract: This paper explores team formation when workers differ in skills and their desire to out-earn co-workers. I cast this question as a two-dimensional assignment problem, characterise the equilibrium sorting and payoffs for three large classes of specifications, and find that heterogeneity in status preferences drastically changes the distributional and organisational consequences of skill-biased technological change (SBTC). Strikingly, the benefits of SBTC trickle down to low-skill workers with weak relative concerns even when there are no complementarities in production. Moreover, SBTC incentivises domestic outsourcing, as firms seek to avoid detrimental social comparisons between high- and low-skill workers, which provides a compelling explanation for the observed long-term increase in domestic outsourcing.

Keywords: Relative concerns; Multidimensional sorting; Trickle-down effects; Skill-biased technological change; Outsourcing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D91 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272725001732
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:249:y:2025:i:c:s0047272725001732

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105475

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().