The Flexible-Salary Match: A proposal to increase the salary flexibility of the National Resident Matching Program

Most graduating medical students in the United States obtain hospital residencies through the National Resident Matching Program (“NRMP”). The NRMP, or “Match” as it is called, is a centralized procedure that begins each year with hospitals defining residency positions, including a fixed specification of the associated salaries. The Match has been criticized on the grounds that this salary inflexibility biases salaries downward and possibly interferes with efficient allocation of students to positions. This paper proposes a centralized procedure, called the “Flexible-Salary Match,” which makes salaries fully flexible and may help to overcome those problems.