Matching with preferences: Caring who cares for the old

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data from a matchmaking agency that records households' and workers' ex-ante preferences, realized matches, wages, and job durations.

I estimate a structural matching model to recover each party's valuation of match attributes as a function of preferences, and their impact on employment stability. Linking the data to population registers shows that demand is rising fastest where preferences over workers' origin are stronger, while gender preferences will weaken.

Simulations predict welfare changes under varying care worker compositions and suggest that losses from a shift toward distant immigrant workers are modest.

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