Dale
T. Mortensen, who jointly awarded the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Science with Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides because of their strongly
influential research on the economics of labor markets and unemployment, was
died at 74 on January 9, 2014.
Mortensen
has been seen as the pioneer on matching theory research in labor markets that
can usefully be applied to insightfully understand unemployment problems in the
reality. According to classical theory of economics, sellers and buyers always
successfully match to finalize their transaction. If we apply this theory for
analyzing labor markets, the results will be that in this case workers as
sellers and firms as buyers are easy to match each other. However, this theory
does not convincingly work in the real world. Particularly, in labor markets, there
still popular phenomena that coincidentally, when job seekers take so long time
to achieve their jobs while firms have many vacancies, conversely firms still
fail in fulfilling their vacant positions while there are many unemployed try
to find jobs even if in prosperous times of the economy. This is called as the“matching
problems.” Mortensen has successfully explained this reality and applied to
disclosure unemployment in labor markets based on the idea of “market frictions.”
This theory is also significant to acquire insights into housing markets,
public finance as well as marriage markets.