Education, Ranking, and Competition for Jobs
研究在存在搜索性失业的情况下，工人投资于通用人力资本（教育）的激励。企业偏好雇佣生产率更高的求职者，导致失业者的排名影响其就业率，从而引发“竞赛”，使教育投资可能超过社会最优水平。
I study workers' incentives to invest in general human capital (education) in the presence of search-induced unemployment. Workers queue for jobs, and firms prefer to hire the most productive applicants because of rent sharing. As a result, an unemployed worker's ranking relative to other job seekers will influence his job-finding rate. This creates a "rat race, " where workers invest in education partly in order to achieve a better ranking. In equilibrium, identical workers may have incentives to diversify in terms of education, and the investments in education may exceed the socially optimal level. Copyright 1999 by University of Chicago Press.