I've got some reading to do

I'm trying to learn more about the contributions of Roth and Shapely, and I am discovering that I need to carefully review the work of Roth especially. He's done a lot of work on market design for specialized labor markets, specifically in the health field.

The work I've done with Hal Salzman on science and engineering labor markets has emphasized the functioning of a pretty traditional decentralized, market-based approach. We often present our work on labor market adjustment in contrast to the all too common calls for what amounts to "manpower planning" (at least that's what we called it several decades ago).

Roth's work looks into a black box that Hal and I haven't really looked at, and that's the details of the labor market institutions themselves - especially in high skill labor markets. Granted, in the labor markets that I've looked at (primarily engineering so far) there is not labor allocation mechanism like the systems he's looked at for residency programs and gastroenterologists (at least as far as I'm aware of). But there are institutional frameworks that structure any of these markets, and boning up on Roth's work seems like a good place to start.

Brad DeLong suggested to me I work on the health care labor market, and even went as far as suggesting I oughta dedicate a dissertation chapter to it. The connections with my interests are obvious and there will definitely be a lot of demand for work in that area. I think today's Nobel Prize is an excellent oppotunity for me to start taking that plunge.

This is a list of some of Roth's important work on health care labor markets.