A recent antitrust lawsuit against the National Residency Matching Program renewed interest in understanding the effects of a centralized match on wages of medical residents. Bulow and Levin (forthcoming) propose a simple model of the NRMP, in which firms set impersonal salaries simultaneously, before matching with workers, and show that a match leads to lower aggregate wages compared to any competitive outcome. This paper models a feature present in the NRMP, ordered contracts, that allows firms to set several contracts while determining the order in which they try to fill these contracts. I show that the low wage equilibrium of Bulow and Levin is not robust to this feature of the NRMP, and competitive wages are once more an equilibrium outcome. Furthermore, a match with ordered contracts has different properties than former models of centralized matches with multiple contracts.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
12334.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 2006 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12334
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John William Hatfield & Paul R. Milgrom, 2005.
"Matching with Contracts,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 913-935, September.
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Michael Schwarz & M. Bumin Yenmez, 2009.
"Median Stable Matching,"
NBER Working Papers
14689, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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