Cornell University ILR Research Explores Employment Match Quality

The quality of an employment match is an important aspect of understanding labor market dynamics, according to Professor Michèle Belot, but measuring match quality presents many challenges.

In “Measuring the quality of a match,” forthcoming in “Labour Economics,” Belot, who has a joint appointment in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and College of Arts and Sciences, examines the advantages and drawbacks of various measures of match quality and presents novel evidence from a survey sample of U.S. employees where several measures were collected simultaneously.

“This is a theme that touches on the type of work and research going on at the ILR School,” Belot said. “When you think about the labor market, we are interested in understanding what determines the quality of a match. But what does that actually mean? What is this concept of a good quality match?”

Belot, the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, notes that there are many different ways to determine the quality of a match – asking the employee about job satisfaction, looking at performance evaluations, noting longevity and wages – but the effectiveness of those ways is problematic.

Belot found that some of these measures correlate well, such as wages, performance evaluations and measures of self-reported skill fit, while others do not. For example, job satisfaction and tenure length do not correlate well.

Also, when considering changes over the course of tenure, she found striking differences in trends. Wages, performance evaluations and skill fit all trend upwards, while job satisfaction trends downwards.

Cornell Department of Economics graduate students Xiaoying Liu and Vaios Triantafyllou co-authored the paper.