Working Papers and Slides by Ryoichi Imai

imryoichi[aaaaattttt]isc.kyushu-u.ac.jp

All papers and slides are in PDF formats (.pdf).

A Directed Search Model of Marriage (May 2012)

Middlemen and Resale (March 2012)

A Search Model of the Resale Market (July 2011), Slide

A Search Model of Bestsellers (February 2011)

Employment Protection and Welfare (March 2004, 261K)

The paper presents an equilibrium model with on-the-job search to consider the welfare implications of labor market institutions on job separations. Both wages and income transfers are endogenously determined. The equilibrium of the laissez-faire economy is not Pareto efficient. There are too many searchers on the match if the property right of employment is specified. Legal institutions to oblige leaving agents to compensate for the loss restore a Pareto efficient allocation. Severance payments to workers upon dismissal result in the same efficient allocation as workers' gifts to their employers, with a remarkable difference in the wage schedules. The employment protection legislation that reduces firms' incentive to search only, does not maximize the Benthamite welfare function of the economy.

KEYWORDS: search, matching, unemployment, inequality, employment protection, the Coase theorem

Endogenous Education and Job Creation (September, 2003, 284K)

The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of the complementarity between education and job creation. It endogenizes the workers' human capital investment decision in a search-theoretic model of education-based labor market segmentation. The distribution of workers' education is simultaneously determined with the job creation by firms. High-educated workers crowd low-educated ones out of the middle-skill jobs that have been traditionally created for the latter's entry jobs after school graduation. The model allows for workers' on-the-job search for their suitable jobs, and produces such a high unemployment rate gap across education that matches the real labor market data. With the workers' heterogeneity in the education cost, an increase in the productivity gap between the high-skill and low-skill jobs results in a larger fraction of high-educated workers. Although the existence of multiple equilibria is a natural outcome of the model, the equilibrium is unique in terms of on-the-job search in this paper. Some welfare property is also presented.

Home (in Japanese)