Authors: Thomas Gall (University of Southampton), Patrick Legros (ECARES, Universitie Libre de Bruxelles and CEPR) Andrew F. Newman (Boston University and CEPR)
Paper number 1412
This paper studies rigidities in sharing joint payoffs (non-transferability) as a source of excessive segregation in labor or education markets. The resulting distortions in ex-ante investments, such as education acquisition, link such mismatches to the possibility of simultaneous under-investment by the underprivileged and over-investment by the privileged. This creates an economic rationale for rematch policies like affirmative action, which have to be evaluated in terms of both incentives and the assignment quality. We compare a number of such policies that have empirical counterparts. Our results indicate that some of these policies can be beneficial on both equity and efficiency grounds.