The celebrated problem of mass transportation, initially studied by Gaspard Monge two centuries ago, revisited by Kantorovich in the 1940s and rejuvenated over the last decade by Cedric Villani's texts, has recently found a range of various applications to Economics, including predicting the odds of individuals on the marriage market, and analyzing the evolution of wage dispersion. I will discuss statistical techniques to estimate matching surplus on such markets, as well computational challenges and algorithms. This talk is based on several recent papers which can be found at http://alfredgalichon.com/research/#matching, and on the forthcoming monograph http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2699381.

This talk will be targeted for a broad scientific audience.